


The Knights' Pet

by Ludovica



Series: The Knights‘ Pet [1]
Category: Dredd (2012), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Body Horror, M/M, Non-Consensual Touching, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Slavery, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Unhealthy Relationships, fair warning the Kylux is secondary, intersex techie, not so fair warning this fic is dark as hell, specifically eye-related body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-05-08 18:19:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 61,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14699676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ludovica/pseuds/Ludovica
Summary: After the Knights of Ren destroy the headquarters of a criminal gang to take control of their sector for the First Order, one of Kylo's knights finds a peculiar treasure in the rubble: A human with the face and voice of General Hux. Fascinated by this, Kylo takes him back to the planet-side base of the First Order, the Temple of Ren, to find out more about this squalid, desolate boy.Techie's existence has always been filled with fear and pain, but when MaMa's complex is destroyed by just a handful of dark-clad, incredibly powerful beings, he is sure the life he had been clinging to by the tips of his fingers is finally at an end. But like by a twist of fate, he does not die like everybody else in the complex. Instead, he is taken away to a place of darkness, where his fate will be decided by a secret from a past he cannot remember.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is already finished, so a new chapter will be updated every Friday. Please heed the warnings in the tags; if you feel I should add any warnings, please tell me :)
> 
> Cross-posted to [tumblr](http://frillyfacefics.tumblr.com/post/174032454351/the-knights-pet-chapter-1)
> 
> Comments are super appreciated <3

The rubble of the compound was burning beneath Kylo Ren’s feet. The roof he was standing on, the roof of the last building that they had yet to raze, afforded him a spectacular vista of the smoldering darkness, breaking into flames every now and again, illuminating broken plates of duracrete and corroded steel rafters. His mask filtered out the smoke that wafted through the air, and without the risk of inhaling the toxic fumes, he was able to enjoy the sight in front of him to his grim content. They had taken a whole moon back for the Order in the course of two days, and now that the headquarters of the gang that had controlled half the solar system and the spice trade in half a dozen worlds outside it lay in ruins before him, with the corpse of the gang’s leader dripping blood and gore onto the roof behind him, they would be able to return to the Temple and report their victory to the Supreme Leader.

Silent steps approached from behind, and Kylo turned to see one of his Knights approach him. The Knight stooped when Kylo turned and bowed his head slightly.

“Krel has found something that you might want to see, Kylo.”

Kylo frowned beneath the mask – he had sent Kolka, the Knight in front of him, and Krel, another one of his Knights, to scope out the rest of the building to make sure there were no survivors.

Kolka led him to a room on the second highest level, filled with control screens, computer consoles and server cabinets. Krel was sitting on her hunches a little off one of those cabinets. She had taken off her mask, and her yellow eyes gleamed in the sparse light of the screens. Her blue skin looked dark grey in the half-light. It struck Kylo once again how small she was, especially for a Chagrian – when she was cowering like that, her head hardly reached up to Kylo’s knee. The contrast between the huge sword she had put down beside herself and her own crouching figure made her look even more runt-like.

“Come out there,” she was cooing towards the cabinet when Kylo entered, followed by Kolka. “Come out, little mouse, or I will be very angry…” Her voice was an eerie singsong in the silence only broken by the occasional hum of an overheating server. “You don’t want to make me angry, do you?”

The room started to shake ever so slightly, causing the walls and floor to creak. She was showing off her power, playing with whatever prey she had chased behind those cabinets. It wasn’t exactly becoming behavior for a Knight of Ren, but Kylo was curious to see why exactly Kolka had thought that Kylo would be interested to see this.

The shaking intensified until Kylo could hear a low whimpering sound coming from behind the cabinet. A hand reached out, grabbed the corner, and then a face followed, the terrified face of a pale human with oily, orange hair and strangely intense red circles around his eyes. When those eyes darted towards him and Kolka, who were both still standing in the door, before flitting back to Krel, he could see that they were bionics, of a cheap, unnatural blue. A badly done tattoo on his forehead was half hidden by his greasy bangs. He was wearing a garish, ancient yellow sweater which, in combination with his hair, made him stand out in the drabness of the server room.

Krel reached one hand out to him, and the man’s body suddenly straightened, his arms pressed to his side, the panic on his face intensified. Without releasing her Force grip on the human, the Chagrian looked at Kylo and grinned. “What do you say, Master?”

Kylo couldn’t help a frown, though his mask would hide any show of emotion. “I don’t see why you would think I would want to see another one of those grimy lowlife criminals. Get rid of him, we’ve wasted enough time already.”

Their captive’s bionic eyes grew even wider than they had been before, but Krel just pushed him closer towards Kylo with the Force.

“Imagine him in a uniform,” she said, “and look closer.”

Kylo frowned and took a closer look at the man. He was young, maybe in his early twenties, though you could never quite tell with people who had led a life full of malnutrition and polluted air. There was indeed something familiar about him, but Kylo just couldn’t put his finger on it –

“Please, I’ve never worn any uniform, please let me go, I had to work with them, it wasn’t my idea, please”

– until he started to beg. And suddenly, even though Kylo had never heard this voice begging or fearful, he knew who he reminded him of. The boy’s face was a little swollen, likely from a sodium-rich diet of canned goods, and malnutrition had stunted his growth so that he was a good head shorter than Kylo, but the shape of his nose, his lips, his forehead, his ears…

He looked just like a shorter, younger, extremely down-on-his-luck version of Hux. And he sounded eerily like him as well.

“What in the galaxy…” he muttered under his breath, too low for his vocoder to pick up. Logically, he knew that this could be merely coincidence, but something told him that there was some strange connection between this refuse of humanity and the General of the First Order.

The boy in front of him, meanwhile, looked like he was about to faint. Krel stepped forward and put one gloved hand on the scruff of his neck, keeping him perfectly still even though he had quite few inches on her.

“Can we take him to the Temple, Master? Maybe we’ll find out why he looks so much like the General – and either way, he could be useful. He seems to have built the security protocols that gave us that spot of trouble earlier.” She wasn’t looking at Kylo as she said that, but at the young man in her grip, with a fascination in her eyes that was usually reserved for creatively cut-up corpses.

Kylo wasn’t quite sure what she was planning – it was even possible that she wasn’t planning anything, and that she just had found some kind of fascination with this strange little Hux-copy. To be fair, he was feeling rather fascinated himself, and this building would soon be eaten by the flames just like the others, so this wasn’t the best place for a thorough ‘interview’ to find out what was going on with this man.

“Alright,” he answered, then turned towards the door. “But you will take care of him.”

He could hear Krel’s grin in her voice when she answered: “Oh yes, don’t you worry.” Then there was a click, Krel putting on her mask again, and Kylo left the control room together with the other two Knights and their strange little captive.

~*~

There had been many times before when Techie had been sure his life was about to end. He hadn’t had much hope to survive this day, not after their attackers had broken through all of his security protocols. Not after the fires had started. Not after he had lost contact with MaMa.

He had been surprised by the small number of attackers, and he hadn’t been able to warn the clan fast enough. He hadn’t been able to put the complex into complete shut-down before they had been inside. But after he had seen what these people had done to steel and duracrete, who knew if a complete shut-down would have bought them more than an hour… But still, he was sure that it was his fault, and even though he had instinctively known the moment he had lost contact with MaMa that something had happened to her, he had still been sure she would kill him for good this time, for fucking up so spectacularly again.

But apparently he wasn’t going to die by her hands, which was a realization that would have turned his entire world upside down, if that had not already been done by the dark-clad people who had attacked the complex. Even now, as he was walking out of the control room and down the corridor, following the back of one of their attackers and held by the hand of another on the back of his neck, he did not quite understand what was happening. He was shivering like a leaf, but that wasn’t anything new; fear was the emotion he was most familiar with. But he did not understand why he was even still feeling fear. Why was he still alive? These people – they had said he looked like somebody, like some General, whatever that was supposed to be. But why would that make them want to keep him alive?

What were they planning to do to him?

The one who was still leading him by the scruff of the neck – the blue alien who had found him first, and who had seemed to make the room shake (he wondered if she used a seismic weapon or something; if that was the reason why the eastern block had just crumbled in on itself during the latter half of the attack) had said he seemed to be ‘useful’. But to people like that, people who could take over an armored and secured clan complex filled with over a hundred heavily armed people within what, two hours? Of what use could he be for them? Were they taking others as prisoners too? But the blue alien had had to actually ask the tall one – the one who she had addressed as ‘master’ – to keep him alive. He would have died if it wasn’t for that request.

He felt as if ice was flowing through his veins instead of blood by the time they had reached the foot of the last staircase – the elevators had been shot at the beginning of the attack. The hand at his neck vanished, but that strange feeling, that paralyzing weight that had made him unable to move earlier, returned now. It didn’t restrain his arms again, but he felt the pressure at the back of his neck as if the hand was still there, and he kept walking where the pressure led him.

They led him out of the complex and towards a small black ship, a shuttle of some kind. More black-clad figures with masks hiding their features were waiting there, figures he had only seen through the security of his screens before. He felt horribly vulnerable without this distance; he had never liked to leave his control room in the first place, and now being bodily in the proximity of the people who had caused all the destruction he was leaving behind was turning his stomach into a gravel pit.

He still didn’t believe that he wouldn’t die.

And this suspicion grew when one of the group waiting by the shuttle stepped forward toward them, the visor of their mask not turned towards their leader, who kept walking toward another two of the black-clad people, but towards him and the alien behind him.

“What’s with that one?” they asked. Their voice was as contorted as that of their master when he had spoken, but Techie was pretty sure it was feminine.

“We’re taking him to the Temple,” the alien behind him said, her voice also distorted and strange now that she was wearing her mask again. “Kylo approved it.”

The person in front of him stepped closer, and Techie could be wrong since he was still shaking with fear, so everything seemed intimidating to him, but he had the distinct feeling that she was standing up straighter, making herself taller.

“Why would you do that?” she asked, and now she leaned in so close to Techie that he could see himself in the reflective surface of her mask, one half of which was completely blank, while the other showed an intricate metal pattern.

He felt a hand on his arm, and then he was pulled back and the alien stepped in front of him. She was noticeably shorter than the other woman, though the strange, bulky shape of her cowl made her appear nearly twice as wide.

“Because how often do you find a human who looks basically identical to the General of the First Order, Kull? This decision has been already made. You should not be questioning Kylo. Why are you trying to spoil my fun?”

Another person came towards them, and he saw how the new person put a hand on the shoulder of the woman who had confronted the alien – who the alien had called ‘Kull’.

“Taking a human to the Temple for ‘fun’ might not be the best idea, Krel,” a distorted, but distinctly male voice – gravely, deep – said. “You are already volatile. Getting attached to anybody would be a bad idea.”

The alien – Krel? – let out a noise that might have been a snort, though the distortion through her mask made it difficult to discern. “Listen to you, ‘getting attached would be a bad idea’. How many decades are you going to need to get this Jedi crap out of your head? There is not an inch of proof that attachment impedes your connection to the Dark Side, and-“

The other black-clad figure who had been with them in the control room and who had not yet spoken in Techie’s presence stepped forward next to the alien. He was wider than the alien and taller than the other woman, and he was blocking Techie’s view of what was happening.

“This is neither the time nor the place for this sort of debate. Kylo approved, and that is all that Kull or you need to know. A security technician would be of quite some use to Sizzly, he is not just going to sit around like some pet for Krel to play with.”

“But you can’t just randomly pick up some pathetic humanling on some disease-infested planet and take him to the Temple just because!” The voice of Kull again.

“You’re just the person to say that,” Krel responded, and then there was the sound of leather hitting armor, and Techie was knocked back on his butt as both women were pulled apart by their respective male companions.

Small stones were flying between them like in zero gravity, and Techie could feel the anger in the air just like he had done before MaMa’s punishments. He immediately cowered down, holding his hands over his head in a reflex he had acquired long before his time as MaMa’s property, when he heard heavy, fast footsteps approaching. He looked up to see the large man they had called Kylo standing in front of him, between the two women, his cape billowing in the strange energy that was flowing between them.

“Again?” he said, so lowly that the falling of the pebbles a second later seemed to be louder than his voice, but except for that series of little click-clacks, all noise had stopped. He was standing between the two women and the men at their sides like a wall lined with explosives, ready to take out whoever tried to break through it.

He turned to Kull first, who immediately flinched backwards, but was held firmly by the man next to her.

“I have been tolerating your behavior, and I understand that you are still learning, Kull,” Kylo said, “but if you keep focusing your anger at Krel, I will have to punish you.”

The reflective part of the woman’s mask flashed as her head twitched to the side just a little, but then her shoulders dropped and she turned her head away. Kylo turned around to Krel.

“And there is no reason to gloat for you either. You should know better than to bait her.” Krel straightened a little at that, then murmured: “Yes, master,” and Kylo nodded, before he turned back to the shuttle.

“Get the boy inside.”

Techie was pulled up by his arms while he was still trying to make sense of this situation. These people had just destroyed the entire MaMa Clan within two hours, they apparently could move things with their mind, they had made whole buildings collapse – it did not quite compute in his mind that they were fighting like this, like, like children, and that the man who they called ‘master’ would talk to them like a frustrated overseer talked to half-grown slavelings.

He was dragged into the shuttle by his arm while his legs cooperated more or less automatically. Strong arms pushed him down on a bench running down the side of the shuttle as the rest of the black-clad warriors filed inside. The shuttle door was still open when he felt the engines roar to life, and as they were lifted off the face of the planet, all eight of the dark figures took formation around the open hatch. He couldn’t quite see what they were doing, but after a few moments, a large bubble started to materialize just outside of the hatch, a bubble that was mostly translucent, but held a strange, reddish sheen. The air was electric, and Techie pushed farther towards the wall of the shuttle, tried to make himself small again, when the eight suddenly lifted their arms and the bubble shot away, towards where they had just been a few moments ago. Before the hatch finally closed, he could see the flames of the explosion reach the skies as the last remnants of the complex went up in flames.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally twice as long as this, but I decided to cut it in half, because just... No.
> 
> Catch me on [tumblr](http://frillyfacefins.tumblr.com), and if you like this fic so far, I'd love to hear from you over there or in the comments :)

The shuttle took them out of the planet’s orbit and finally docked to some bigger ship – at least, Techie assumed so, since there were no viewing panels within the part of the shuttle they were in. He was marched down a long hallway by the same small alien who had ‘caught’ him, and then put into a tiny room with a narrow berth and a camera in one corner.

“Use the travel time to calm down,” Krel told him. “We’ll be at the Temple in a few hours.”

Then the door closed behind her, and Techie heard the locking mechanism clicking into place. He sat down on the berth and stared at the camera for a while, then at the opposite wall. He wanted to cry, but he hadn’t been able to cry since he had gotten his bionics, and dry sobbing had never given him the same relief as crying had, back before MaMa. He finally curled up in the back-most corner of the cot and drew his knees all the way to his body, then pulled the seam of his yellow sweatshirt over his legs and the collar over his face. The darkness wasn’t perfect, since the bright artificial light coming from a fixture above the door sent its glaring beams through the threadbare fabric, but he felt a little better like that, small and hidden and protected, no matter how well he knew that these feelings were just lies he told himself. Being a little ball was better than being all of himself, all of the planes of his body, the length of his limbs, all of that surface that could be beaten and burned and used up until he was as threadbare as his shirt.

Now that he was alone, out of any immediate danger, a deep tiredness began to work its way into his body. He couldn’t remember how long he had been awake… It had been two days at the very least before the attack had happened, and the last time he had been allowed to sleep, how many hours had he gotten, three, four? Stars, he wanted to sleep. But if he fell asleep now, he might not wake up by himself before the ‘few hours’ were up. What would Krel do if she found him sleeping? Nobody would wake him up before that. Rano, the guy who he had traded favors with back in MaMa’s complex to make sure he knew when MaMa was coming so he could get back to his screens, had been killed by a burning beam falling down on top of him while Techie had watched it happen on his security feeds.

If he fell asleep, Krel would find him. The thought of her waking him up – of what she might do to wake him up – nearly sent him sobbing despite his determination not to do that. But he was so tired… Just a few moments… Just to ease the burning in his eyes a little bit…

The touch of a gloved hand woke him up, and immediately panic flooded his body again. He sat up in a frenzy to see Krel standing above him. She was wearing her mask, which he now, in the light of the room, could see wasn’t quite flat at the front, but it had waves like corrugated iron, with the broadest wave containing the visor. She had taken her hand off his shoulder when he had sat up, and was now turning around.

“Come on, we’re here.”

A wave of relief washed over Techie. He wasn’t going to be punished for falling asleep – it had been an irrational fear too, hadn’t it? Why would his captors care if he slept or not? There had been no command to the contrary. But still, sleeping had been such a risky thing for the last few years of his life, it was strange that it just went by without a comment.

He still felt shaken when he followed Krel out of the room and down the hallway again. They passed soldiers in strange white body armor and people in pristine black uniforms, and he suddenly felt incredibly self-conscious. Not only were his clothes dirty and stinking of smoke and sweat, he was also barefoot, and the feeling of the icy floor beneath his bare feet in combination with the stares of the people around him – those without masks – made him suddenly miss the familiar warmth of his server room and his security screens.

He slowly started to believe that he might not actually die. Why would they have taken him into this ship if they wanted to kill him? Why would they take him to this ‘Temple’ if they were just going to execute him?

Except if… Back when he had been a child, back in the days when he had been around other slaves a lot, he had heard of people being sacrificed to gods, or for rituals to invoke old magic. Magic like the one these people were practicing… But they had talked about his skills with security networks, right? They had said he might be useful – they wouldn’t sacrifice him if he was useful, would they? And if they needed sacrifices, why would the one with the half-mirror mask have been so angry that he had been there? No, he couldn’t believe that he was going to be bled on some altar to appeal to some archaic power. It didn’t make sense. It wouldn’t happen.

Too bad that logic had never gone a very long way to make him feel better about bad situations; he just had been in too many of those that would have defied any of it.

They finally turned into a corridor where he could see the rest of the black-clad group standing at the end, waiting at a docking hatch. 

Kylo, taller than any of the others and thus easily recognizable, turned to the hatch and opened it after he had seen them approach. They entered a different shuttle now, one with viewing pains in the walls, and Techie froze at the door, overwhelmed by the view in front of him. He had seen the star-spangled darkness of space before, once, on the day when he had been sold to MaMa, but it was still incredible. His stomach lurched with the sheer scale of it; he felt as if the blackness was going to suck him in at any moment.

He felt a push and immediately stumbled forward, just to be caught at the shoulder by the man who had been defending Krel in her earlier altercation. “Never stand in a doorway for too long, or your spirit might get split in half when the door is closed,” his electronically enhanced voice murmured into his ear, and Techie looked up in horror at his mask. Just like Krel’s mask, he hadn’t noticed the details earlier; it was shaped like the face of some kind of large bird, with a short, but sharp beak.

Then there was another hand on his shoulder, and he was pulled in a different direction.

“Don’t frighten the kid,” Krel’s voice said. “The real reason why you shouldn’t stand in a door is because other people might get angry at you for blocking the way. But that is how it is; look, this is where we are going.”

Despite her tiny size, she pushed his body as if it weight nothing, so that he was standing right at one of the viewing panels and could see in a direction he had not been able to see when he had been standing in the door.

The planet was a mass of swirling reds and blacks that swallowed light like he imagined a black hole would. Even from space, it looked utterly inhospitable; like one of the gas planets where you could only, maybe, live on a moon, but would never be able to really inhabit the planet proper. There were a few small moons orbiting this planet, but the planet itself wasn’t very big to begin with, if he was judging the distance correctly.

The door to the shuttle closed, and Krel pulled him down on one of the benches when the vehicle grumbled into life.

They undocked from the spaceship and the shuttle shot towards the planet. Techie craned his neck to keep watching as they came closer and closer. The entrance into orbit was a little shaky, but far less so than Techie would have imagined. As they hurled towards the surface, he suddenly noticed that they were heading to the biggest black part of the planet. The closer they came, the more obvious did it become that all of that black belonged to a single, sprawling structure; a structure with a giant hub in the middle, and many, many buildings connected to it through black tunnels like the legs of a huge spider.

“That’s the temple,” Krel’s voice came from next to him. “Welcome to your new home.”

~*~

The boy looked completely out of place under the arched walkways that led from the port to the Knights’ quarters. Krel was walking close behind him, and through their mind link he could feel her nervous regard for Kull, as if the younger Knight could attack her new toy at any moment. The feeling worried Kylo. Attachments were a difficult topic to deal with, since they could influence one’s actions a lot more than anything else – as had been shown most prominently in the case of Darth Vader himself – and even though he was sure that Krel’s first allegiance would always be the Knights, he needed to keep an eye on this situation.

He knew that the best way would have been not to allow her to take him with her; or to separate them now, so that she wouldn’t start developing affections for the boy. But Kylo had to admit that he was curious himself about the origins of this young man who looked so much like Hux, but was so completely unlike him at the same time. He watched as the boy looked around, his head between his shoulders, his hands twitching nervously as they clutched the hem of his bright yellow shirt, startling every time one of the black-clad, half-masked temple servants walked past them or crossed their way. He could see a few curious glances of the servants in the direction of the newbie as well, which the boy answered by blushing the same red as his hair. He didn’t like to be looked at, that much was obvious. And at the moment, he really wasn’t a pleasure to look at either. Kylo was sure that he would be able to smell him from several feet away if he hadn’t been wearing his helmet.

They reached the archway that led to their quarters, and Kylo held a hand up to make his Knights stand

“Krel, go and wash your little spoils of war, and make sure he gets fresh clothes. Komo, Kashti, Kanar, come with me. I need to talk to you.”

Three of the Knights split off the group and followed him as he walked towards their meeting room.

He took off his helmet when the door had clicked shut, letting out a low sigh before setting it down on the table and running his hand through his hair. He heard the release mechanisms of three more helmets, then turned to his Knights, who had all taken off their hoods and masks.

"All of you have been trained by the Jedi. I want to know whether I put Krel in danger of losing contact to the Dark Side."

Kanar let a hand run down his own Togruta lekku, a sign that he wanted to say something - Kylo had gotten used to his Knights' body language long ago - and Kylo nodded in his direction. "Yes, Kanar?"

"I do not believe that Krel could ever lose her connection to the Dark Side, Master," he said, his voice low and soft as always, the voice of a man who had calmed the forces of nature just with a gentle word. A deceptive attribute in a Dark Knight. "I have raised her from her earliest childhood, and the Light Side has never attracted her. With all due respect, but the kind of conditions we lived with during all of her childhood and such a large part of her adolescence does not lend itself to discovering the Light Side in the first place. I believe she has been bored lately, though - and she has never been allowed to care for another being before."

"That is what I am worried about," Komo broke in, rubbing his white stubble thoughtfully. "You and Lady Kashti, both of you are used to caring for other creatures - be it younglings or beasts - but what if there is a soft side to young Krel that we have not experienced yet?"

"Softness does not translate to being receptive to the Light Side," Kashti said, a frown on her wrinkled face. "She has been hardened, just as I have, just as Kanar has, and at a far younger age. I have hand-reared most of the beasts I am employing at the moment, and I will be heart-broken if they die, but that does not mean that they take me closer to the Light Side. Fear of losing somebody you care about can be a great motivator to study the side of true power."

"And that is what can be found at the rear side of attachment - fear." Kanar looked at Kylo again. "I know my apprentice, Master. She would never do anything that would be detrimental to the Knights of Ren, or to our Supreme Leader. She would never risk losing the power we are giving her for a sweet voice and a pitiful face."

Kylo nodded slowly, then turned to Komo again, who had crossed his arms in front of his chest. "You do not seem to agree."

"I am worried, Master," he said. "Attachments lead to betrayal. The Jedi might not have been right about a lot, but I believe they were right about this. This human she picked up is neither a beast, nor a potential apprentice. It is dangerous for her to become attached to something other than the cause, the power, us or our leader."

"Are you talking about my apprentice, or yours?" Kanar cut in, a little sharper than usual. He didn't follow it up, though, just squared his jaw and crossed his arms as well.

Kylo was silent, thinking. The situation would have been easier if he had just killed the little human, that was for sure. But he still had the feeling that there was an important connection between this little slave and their honored General, and if there was any secret of the General's he could find and exploit, he was willing to take a risk.

"The Jedi believed attachments led to betrayal because in the end, the love of a person to another will always be stronger than the love of a person to the Light Side. But we have seen again and again that the Dark Side is stronger than the Light. What attachment could be more enticing than real Power? I might not have known Krel for as long as Kanar has, but I have gazed into the depths of her mind during my Ascension, and her hunger for power was healthy and strong." He halted for a few moments, again lost in thought. "If I see any worrying signs, I will ask the Supreme Leader for guidance. But for now, we will hand the boy over to Sizzly. It is true that he might yet prove useful."

~*~

As soon as Kylo turned his back, Krel took Techie by the elbow and led him down another hallway.

"You heard the Master, let's get you cleaned up, pet," she singsonged in a way that made Techie's stomach drop. He didn't like how cheerful she was sounding - who would sound so cheerful at the prospect of leading somebody to a shower? And she had called him 'pet' again... He knew what that word had meant back when he had been on Teliran, before MaMa, but did it mean the same thing here? Would he be expected to...

Suddenly one of the dark-clad people he had seen before crossed their path, and Krel grabbed them by the shoulder as well. The person - he couldn't tell if it was a woman or a man, they were wearing a black cap on their head and a black fabric mask over the lower half of their face - looked at Krel with nearly unnaturally calm eyes.

"Yes, Lady Krel?" the person - a man, judging from the voice - said.

"We need a suit of clothes," Krel answered curtly. "Just normal service garb will suffice. His size." She nodded towards Techie, who immediately blushed under the scrutinizing gaze of the man. Then the person nodded and vanished into another hallway.

Krel pulled Techie onward. "The ones in the black clothes with the masks are servants. The ones with the goggles are technicians. You'll get goggles, but first you'll need some clothes that don't look as if they're going to fall off your body the moment somebody touches you."

Krel turned around after that and led the way further through the hallways, until Techie suddenly noticed that the floor was starting to drop - they were walking down now, and after a while the corners vanished and the halls turned into a spiral that got tighter and tighter, until they finally reached a door at the bottom of this spiral walkway. The door slid open with a metallic clanking noise, and Krel led the way inside.

As soon as Techie entered, he felt his jaw drop. He had never seen a room like this. The whole thing seemed to have been curved out of the rock, with a high, domed, irregular ceiling and walls that petered towards that dome. There were pillars that seemed like they had been left out of the carving process, pure rock that connected the crudely hewn floor with the looming ceiling. The whole room was filled with mist that smelled faintly of rot, like the compost pile behind the house he had been living in before MaMa. The air was so wet and hot that sweat started to pour down his face nearly instantly, soaking the collar and back of his sweater within moments.

The door closed behind them with an ominous, final-sounding click. He kept standing with his back to the metal door panels while Krel took off first her mask, which she put on a little stand near the wall, and then the long, thick robes that covered her from head to toe.

Techie couldn't help a little gasp when he saw what had been hidden beneath those robes. He hadn't exactly expected hair - he had known that she was blue, after all, and while he hadn't seen a lot of alien species before, he still knew that not all of them had hair. But to be completely honest, he had expected her to be a Twi'lek. Those were the only aliens who sometimes had blue skin he had ever been really in contact with, and her size and the shape of her face had seemed to fit that assumption. But that long, skin-covered... thing that was hanging from the back of her head down over plates of black armor was nothing he had ever seen before.

Krel turned around, and Techie saw that that thing on the back of her head wasn't the only way in which she was very different from any alien he had ever seen. There were long things hanging from the side of her face, blue and fleshy and completely different from any head-tails he had ever seen, especially since there seemed to be horn-like protrusions coming from the bottom of them.

There was a slightly confused look in Krel's yellow eyes for just a moment, but then her face lightened up in a way that seemed nearly child-like.

"Oh, you've never seen a Chagrian?" She grabbed one of the little horns at the bottom of her thick head-tail like things and wagged it in Techie's direction. "My people aren't really that common around the Outer Rim, I guess. And no, these aren't lekku, so don't even think about them like that. We call 'em tentacles, though we can't really move them." She turned around and lifted the skin pouch at the back of her head up a little, before she let it fall back to the middle of her back. It seemed harder when it moved then when it was just hanging there.

"Headplate," she said as she turned around. "Male Chagrians only have them down to their shoulders, though they do have these huge horns. Always wanted a pair of my own when I was a kid, but you don't always get what you want, do you?"

She wasn't looking at him anymore, since she was taking off her armor, plate by plate, and clicked them onto a metal dummy standing next to the mask stand. The more of the plate vanished, the thinner she appeared, until she was standing there in nothing but long black underwear. It might have been under-armor too; Techie really didn't know the difference, even though quite a few of MaMa's crew had worn it almost constantly. It was amazing just how tiny she looked now - and completely unlike any woman he had seen before. There were no visible curves on her body, and even though he could make out a certain thickness in her muscles, she didn't seem to have any visible hips. She bent down to take off her boots, taking away another few inches of her size, then she took off her underwear as well, revealing a naked body that looked as if it was clothed in another set of blue underwear. She didn't have nipples or a belly button, and her whole body was completely hairless, for that matter. No eyebrows, no leg hair, no nothing. Not even between her legs.

Techie immediately ripped his gaze away when he noticed that he was staring in a very, very unbecoming way. Curiosity was the last thing he needed right now. He hugged his own body and leaned against the metal plates of the door, trying to make himself small so the naked woman in front of him wouldn't notice him. She was currently occupied putting her things away, folding them with overblown accuracy, making sure everything was lying in an exact order that Techie could only guess at. Techie's mind went back to her calling him 'pet' - he still wasn't quite sure how likely it was that he'd be expected to please her sexually. After all, she had quite literally saved his life, and he guessed he belonged to her now. She could ask of him whatever she wanted; but what if she was disappointed with what she would find? First of all, he didn't know how to please anybody who looked like her. And second, what if she asked him to take off his clothes, and what she'd find would leave her wanting? The tattoo on his forehead started to itch as his thoughts went to what she would find between his legs. He usually didn't like to think about it, but what if his... 'aberration' would get him into trouble, again?

He definitely didn't want to get into trouble with Krel. He had seen what she and her fellows had done to the complex, and to the other MaMa-Clan people. He didn't want to find out what she'd do with him if he displeased her.

After a while, Krel seemed to be done with her ministrations. She turned to him again and frowned slightly.

"Why are you still wearing those?" she asked.

Techie immediately flushed even harder than he already had thanks to the heat.

"I-I'm sorry, I didn't-" He didn't end the sentence, because he knew that 'I didn't realize you wanted me to do that' wasn't an excuse for anything. So he just dropped his gaze to the floor and pulled his shirt over his head, heart pounding in his ears. If she saw him naked, she'd see that he was flawed. The thought of being punished made his chin shiver, which he tried to hide by lowering his head even farther and letting his hair fall into his face. He wanted to beg for forgiveness, but that had never really gotten him anywhere either.

"Just drop your clothes on the floor. If there's anything in your pockets or so that you want to keep, put it on that shelf over there." She nodded towards a few shelves next to the mask stand and the armor dummy. "The rest is going to be burned."

His eyes flitted up to her, and for a second a tiny little part of him wanted to protest. These were his clothes; he had been wearing them for years, he liked them, he didn't want them to be burned. 

But with what was to come as soon as he took off his pants he knew that he couldn't afford squandering any good-will she might have towards him. So he just lowered his gaze again and dropped his yellow shirt, then opened his pants, slowly, with shaking hands, and let them drop to the floor as well. He grabbed the waistband of his underpants, but hesitated. His shivering was getting so strong that he didn't know if he would be able to actually pull them down...

"Oh come on, you're not going to be shy now, are you?" The annoyance in Krel's voice made him snap to attention immediately, and, closing his eyes, he pulled his underwear down, stepped out of it, and then straightened his back as far as he could.

Just get it over with.

Krel's eyes ran over his body for a moment, then she turned around and walked farther into the room. "Come on, let’s get you washed up."

Techie felt as if he was frozen in place. She hadn't even commented on it - he had never, ever undressed in front of anybody without them commenting on the fact that he didn't have any balls, but did have a dick - even if it was a pretty small one. This was completely new for him - she hadn't even looked surprised, there had been no sign that she had even realized that he looked strange. He didn't quite know how to deal with this. He had been so sure he'd be about to be ridiculed again.

Krel stopped when she noticed that he wasn't following and turned around. She was looking at his face, raising the ridge where her eyebrows would have been if she had any. "Did you see a ghost or something?" she asked with a slightly amused undertone.

He didn't manage more than slowly shaking his head, which made her frown slightly, and then he suddenly felt a strange pressure behind his forehead, a pressure that turned into a tickling feeling at the back of his head.

"Aaah," Krel said, a smile on her lips now, and now she did look down between his legs, though only for a moment before she looked up again. "First of all, don't worry, I'm not planning to fuck you or anything. Humans don't really do all that much for me." She grinned, showing a row of pointy, short teeth. "And I didn't realize your junk was strange. I've not seen that many naked humans, I thought that was just a variation."

She walked back to him now, until she was standing right in front of him, looking up at his face. She was so small, but he felt as if he was standing in front of a scorpion - no matter how tiny it was, this kind of closeness meant that pain could follow at any moment. How had she known what he... what he had been thinking?

He felt cold even despite the heat in this strange room.

But she didn't hurt him; instead, she reached out to his forehead and ran two fingers over a spot there.

"That's the reason for your tattoo, then? So people don't have to wonder?" There was something like sympathy in her voice, though Techie could have heard that wrong.

"Mh," he started, then he nodded. He was too afraid to open his mouth.

There was that smile again, spiky teeth just so close to his skin.

_People are fucking garbage._

The thought had just been in his head, unbidden, unprompted - as if it wasn't his own thought at all.

"Come on," Krel repeated, but this time she didn't just turn around, but took Techie's hand - as if he was a little child - and led him deeper into the room.

They reached the first stone pillar, and now Techie saw where the mist had come from. The room had five large holes in the floor filled with water, like rock bathtubs. Two of them spit out the bad smelling mist, and Krel was leading him towards one of those.

"Don't worry, you'll get used to the smell. It's pretty much everywhere in the Temple, because we're on a whole lot of natural springs, you know?" There was a tiny shelf next to the waterhole she was leading him to, and she took out a few colorful bottles and some kind of ball of fabric which she positioned at the rim of the tub before she stepped inside, sighing lowly.

"By the stars, this is so nice after a fight... Come on, get in, I'll wash you."

Techie hesitantly moved forward, watching the water suspiciously.

"Uhm, I..." he looked at Krel as he cowered down next to the tub, holding his hand in to determine how hot it was. Hotter than any shower he had ever been in, definitely. "I can... I can wash myself..."

But Krel just made a dismissive motion with her hand and grabbed his wrist again, pulling slightly so that he finally did move into the water. He couldn't help a little hiss as the water closed around his hips. Was it possible for a human to get cooked?

He tried to get rid of that thought as fast as he could.

"The way you look, I seriously doubt that," she said cheerfully, then she pulled him down into the water. Even despite her tiny frame, she was deceptively strong, and Techie slipped on the floor of the tub. He closed his eyes, sure that he would hit his head on the edge, but nothing happened - his body just slowly floated into the tub, until he was lying with his head comfortably against the rim and his legs stretched in front of him.

Krel hummed lowly as she took the wad of cloth and one of the bottles and doused the fabric in shiny, blue liquid.

"Come here," she muttered, but didn't actually move Techie anymore. She knelt down next to him and started to rub the cloth ball over his shoulders. It wasn't quite as soft as it had looked, but slightly rough instead, and Techie could feel his skin rawing up under Krel's diligent rubbing.

"Fuck, you're going to look like a lobster before we're through," Krel murmured as she moved the fabric over his chest and to his other shoulder. She moved his body around as if he was an oversized doll, washing his arms, his belly, his back, then made him stand so she could wash his legs.

Techie felt horribly humiliated. He wasn't a small child, and he wasn't an animal, he really could wash himself - but Krel continued to pose him like a toy, even going so far as to washing between his legs and on his ass, which made Techie wish for the freedom of tears again. He knew he shouldn't be such a baby - after all, this woman had saved his life, she could do with him as she pleased, and if she wanted to wash him it was definitely better than if she had wanted to actually use him for sex, but by all the stars, he just wished she'd stop rubbing his skin so hard...

When she was done with his feet - which she rubbed with special vigor, which still wasn't enough to get them completely clean - she made him sit down again.

"Get your head under the water," she told him, and he obeyed immediately, even though the hot water burned his eyes so badly that he nearly let out a sob when he came back up. His hair was dripping water down into his eyes, and even though he closed them, he still couldn't help the whimper of pain.

Krel used a different cloth to clean his face, a softer one, and Techie was insanely grateful for that, even though her touching the sensitive skin around his eyes still made him jerk back from her touch.

"Those bionics hurt you pretty badly, hm?" she said as she rubbed her cloth over his ears. He couldn't see her face because he still had his eyes closed to keep more water from running into them, but he managed a little nod.

"You're going to be with the medic later, she'll sure take a look at that," Krel said as she put the cloth away and stood up. Techie squinted after her and attempted to stand up as well, but the pressure of her hand on his shoulder kept him from it.

"I'll wash your hair now, you stay just where you are," she ordered, and Techie obeyed.

Having his hair washed felt a lot better than the rest of this ordeal. Krel's fingers were long and thin, and they rubbed the skin of his scalp just right. The soap she was using for his hair was a little different than the one she had used on his body, and he found himself thinking why she would have a different soap for hair - after all, she didn't have any of her own, right? Was this something she did regularly, bathing people with hair?

A sudden sigh brought Techie out of his contemplative enjoyment.

"You know, your hair is really pretty," Krel said, running her fingertips over his temples, which made him feel as if his whole body was melting into pleasure. "It's badly cared for, but such a vibrant color... It's a rare thing among humans, as far as I've seen. A bit like Lethans with the Twi'lek. Did they ask more for you because of your hair?"

Techie swallowed, his eyes glossing over for a second when his thoughts were forced back. He generally disliked remembering anything, really, since it usually just brought back old pain when he was already busy with dealing with the current one.

"When I was a kid, yeah. Before..." He hesitantly touched the tattoo on his forehead. After they figured out he had a defect, he'd pretty much been a bargain.

Krel snorted as she let her fingers rub over the base of his head, making Techie's eyes roll back. How was it possible for just a simple touch on your head to feel this good?

"Just because you've got strange equipment? Why'd that influence your price? I mean, as long as you're not sold for breeding, that shouldn't really influence anything."

Her words made Techie feel strangely... angry. For a second he felt like he had to defend the decision of the merchants to sell him under price for his aberration, but the foolishness of that thought made him clamp his lips shut just to make sure none of it came out. He didn't even understand why he was reacting that way. But it just felt wrong, hearing Krel talk about something that had been a real problem in his life in such a so-what-matter.

He just shrugged, instead of saying anything that might get him in trouble. He didn't want to disagree with her; he didn't want to disagree with people in general, but he'd learned very early never to talk back to his owners. Even if what she was saying was gnawing on him. It wasn't his place to assume he had anything of value to say to her.

She kept washing his hair, and his eyes soon drifted shut when her honestly clever fingers rubbed little circles behind his ears, ran through his hair, tickled his hairline. He actually felt his body relaxing as she took far more time than she had to take. What a strange feeling...

"Kriff”, she murmured after a while, and Techie frowned, cracking open one lazy eye at that. "You're fucking beautiful when you're all soft like that," she said. From the corner of his eye he saw her rinse her hand in the water, and then there were fingers on his chin, rubbing up over his jaw to his ear and then over his cheek bones.

"I wonder if he looks like that too when he's relaxed," she muttered.

Right. They had said he looked a lot like somebody they knew - some General, whatever that was. Techie had never really seen anybody who had looked particularly like him. He had always been paler and blotchier than anybody around him, and back when he had had his real eyes, well... Nobody had had eyes like him.

He felt his mood sink rapidly, and he opened both of his eyes fully to stare at the surface of the water. Krel was now rinsing his hair with handfuls of warm water, rubbing the suds out of it with an efficiency that didn't really have any resemblance to the caresses she had given him earlier. When she was done, she commanded him to dunk his head under the water again, just to make sure, and he did it. The pain in his eyes was less intense than earlier, but he still kept his eyes closed when he came back up, until Krel blessedly carefully padded his eyes dry with a towel. The towel felt rough, but it was better than having all that water burning his sensitive skin.

She made him get out of the tub after that, and this time he didn't even say he could do it himself when she started to towel him off. He just obediently lifted his arms when she told him to, and went down on his knees when she wanted to rub his hair dry.

He was looking at the ground again when the towel vanished and was replaced by gentle fingers separating tangled strands. "I don't have anything here to get your hair in order, but I'm sure Kolka will have something. We'll go up to him to get you something to eat once-"

Suddenly the noise of the door opening made Techie's head snap up - acutely aware of the pose he was in right now, on his knees, naked in front of his equally naked master - but there was just the sound of steps, then a soft wooshing sound like somebody unfolding fabric, and then another few steps before the door slid closed again.

"That'll be your clothes, then," Krel commented, and he looked up at her face. She was looking a lot more impressive from this perspective, with the strange spikes on the end of her... 'tentacles' aiming right at him. She was looking at his face, her fingers rubbing his cheek again, a contemplative look in her eyes.

"Such a shame to mark up something so pretty," she muttered, then ran her finger over his tattoo again. "If you want, I'm sure we can get rid of that. Shouldn't hurt too much, either. I mean, the medic once sewed half of Lady Kashti's thigh back on, can't be so much more difficult to get rid of some ugly ink."

_If you want._

Techie opened his mouth to answer, but couldn't quite get himself to do it. Nobody had ever asked him about something like this. It wasn't like he had any right to decide what happened with his body, after all. If Krel had wanted to remove it, and had told him that it would be removed, he guessed that he would have been relieved in a way, but, like this...

_If you want._

He really didn't know if he wanted. On one side, of course he wanted to not have those ugly, wonky letters on his forehead telling all the world that something was wrong with him - but on the other side, he had been living with this tattoo for so long...

And just the fact that he apparently could say 'No, I don't want this' made him want to say that, to be honest. He wanted to say 'no' to something. He nearly felt dizzy when he thought about it, but deciding not to do something somebody else wanted him to do... He really, really wanted that.

He would stay here, after all, right? So if he would decide later that he wanted to get rid of the tattoo, chances were that he'd still be able to do that. But right now, right now he could say 'no'.

Of course, he didn't say it. He didn't think his mouth would cooperate with him there. So instead he just shook his head.

For a second he thought Krel would tell him off, would tell him that the tattoo would be removed no matter what he wanted because she wanted to have it removed, but then she just shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, and then she rubbed his ears dry before she threw the towel on the floor next to the other bathing things she had been using.

She bent down to help him get off his knees, and he appreciated the help – his knees felt too weak to get him up on their own right now.

“Now, clothes, then food,” she said. “Your clothes should be next to the door, go ahead.”

She turned around and walked away, to get her own clothes, he guessed. He kind of doubted that she was planning to run around naked, even if there wasn’t really anything to be seen when she wasn’t wearing clothes.

He found a suit of clothes spread out on a little table a bit off the door, a black long-armed shirt and black trousers with a pair of practical looking boots. With as warm as this place was, he was pretty sure he’d be soaked with sweat very soon, but he was still grateful for the clothes. There were no holes in them, no faded bits or parts where the seams had unraveled, and they fit like a glove. Getting into the boots took a little time, since he wasn’t very used to wearing shoes in the first place and since they fit kind of snugly, but in the end, when he got back on his feet after sitting down to get them on, they actually made him feel pretty good. At least he wouldn’t have to be careful not to step on broken glass or metal bits on the floor anymore. He also liked the look of them when he looked down on his feet. It felt like this wasn’t quite him, but whoever this person was, he kind of liked being them.

Krel came to him a few moments later, in clothes that looked very much like his, though her boots were higher and she had put on a black leather vest over her long-armed shirt, which made Techie wonder if she could maybe be cold in this smeltering heat. After all, he didn't know anything about the kind of alien she was. She had called herself a Chagrian before, but he had honestly never heard of that.

She looked him up and down, then grinned as she went to open the door.

"You look pretty good in black. Give you an oversized belt buckle and a greatcoat and you'd pretty much look like the General exactly. Well, except for the eyes, and you'd have to cut your hair." She looked over her shoulder while the door slipped open, frowning slightly. "Nah, you really shouldn't do that to be honest. That length fits you. Maybe you could do something to make it a bit less dry, but I have no idea how to do that, honestly. Hair is strange."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, sorry that there was no chapter last week; this week was kind of crazy. Here you go, though, but please heed the additional warnings, nkay?
> 
> Chapter-specific warnings: Stuffing, Vomiting, people generally being assholes to Techie.

She waved for him to follow her as they walked up the spiral walkway again. When they entered the regular hallways, Techie allowed himself to have a little look around while he followed Krel. He hadn't really been paying attention earlier, but now that he did, he noticed that the walls weren't just dark, like he'd thought earlier when he had only looked at them from the corner of his eyes, but that they were covered in paintings. There were paintings of monsters, paintings of planets, paintings of humans and aliens, some of them just standing there, others engaging in one kind of action or another, fighting, debating, looking at each other. They were all strangely stylized, drawn in only the most basic of shapes, but still clear, and the strength and nearly supernatural intensity of the pictures made a shiver run down Techie's spine. As they came around a corner, there was a picture of a giant, black star ship that seemed to stretch from one end of the hall to the other. Or at least, he thought it was a star ship. Though, when he looked ahead at the other end of the hallway, it nearly looked as if the ship had... eyes.

But he didn't get to really investigate this, as Krel stopped in front of a door and triggered the opening mechanism without as much as a buzz.

The room in front of them was a lot more like what Techie was used to. There was no strange stone ceiling, and no pillars growing out of the ground. The room was still dark, with black cut stone lining the floor and maps and strange pictures covering the walls. It seemed to be a kind of living room; there were a few shelves filled with packs of flimsi, data tapes, and things that Techie couldn't really describe, and a computer console on one side of the room. The other was dominated by a large, round table with a round bench closing it in to three fourths. Two people were sitting at that table, and both looked up as Krel came towards them. They were wearing variations of Krel’s black fabric-and-leather ensemble. Both of them were human, as far as Techie could say, though the large, broad-shouldered man was so hairy that he easily could have been part of an alien race that Techie just didn't know. He had a thick, brown beard and brown, curly hair that he had put into a ponytail that didn't look as if it would survive very long. His eyebrows looked like small mammals that were sleeping on his face, and more hair was poking out of the collar and the sleeves of his shirt.

He had the same yellow eyes as Krel, and for some reason they gave Techie a feeling of dread.

The other human was a woman of average height, with a kind of wiry, muscular built that reminded him of quite a few women he had known in the MaMa clan. Her eyes were brown, and her short hair dark blond, and he would have been surprised by how absolutely unremarkable she looked, if she hadn't looked at him with such a look of utter contempt as he had rarely seen before.

"I'm going to leave before I get lice," she hissed and stood from the bench. "At least he doesn't stink anymore," she muttered as she passed Krel. Techie was kind of surprised that she hadn't bumped her shoulder into Krel's, so angry did she look.

Krel looked after her as she walked through the door, frowning.

"Well, that was Lady Kull, just so you know," she told Techie without looking at him, then she sat down on the bench where the other woman had just been sitting. "And this is Lord Kolka. Have you ordered the food already?" She switched her attention to the other man mid-sentence, leaving Techie standing rather awkwardly in front of the table.

The man nodded, his strange yellow eyes never leaving Techie for a second. "It should be here any moment. What are you doing there, standing around like an etiquette droid? Sit down."

He patted the space on the bench next to him, on the opposite site from Krel. Techie didn't really want to sit so close to this man, but he still did as he had been told, trying to quench the queasy feeling in his stomach. Where the danger he felt coming from Krel was subtle, until it wasn't, this man radiated it. He was nearly twice as broad as Techie, and he could see the bulging of his biceps through the thin fabric of his shirt. He made sure to leave about a foot between the two of them, just enough space that it wouldn't appear as if he was disobeying a direct order, but he could still feel the heat that was coming off him, as if his body burned hotter than that of ordinary humans.

Techie nearly jumped when a hairy paw of a hand came down on his thigh.

"I hope you're hungry. I ordered twice as much as I usually do."

His voice was dark and booming, and he suddenly recognized it as the voice of the person who had been defending Krel earlier. He looked at the woman he considered his master, seeking some kind of guidance how to react to the strange man's intensity, but Krel had pulled out a little pouch he hadn't noticed had been hanging off her belt and was taking out something that looked like flat bread. Krel seemed to notice his look, but she seemed to think he was looking at her because of the bread.

"Oh, I always bring my own food wherever I go. I make it myself, too. Human food's not as rich in nutrients, you see." She started to nibble on a piece of the white, nearly greyish bread when the door opened again. One of the black-clad, half-masked servants came into the room, carrying a large, flat container. She put the container down on the table in front of them and then pressed a button in the middle of the top of it. The lid started to recede towards the edges of the container, until it had turned into a large tablet filled with mountains of steaming hot food. The smell that hit Techie damn near made him drool –it had been a long time since he had had meat, or vegetables that weren't cooked into oblivion or preserved until they tasted like nothing but salt, and here were more meat and vegetable dishes than he could have eaten in a week, plus bread, noodles, and a whole lot of stuff he couldn't identify. He was so mesmerized by the huge display of food that he jumped when somebody put a plate and utensils in front of him, and then a cup. He looked up to see another servant pour water into his cup, while the other one put down a large serving ladle next to the tablet, bowed, and left the room.

The second servant vanished soon after her, and the door slid shut again. Kolka took Techie's plate - which made panic well up in him again for a second, until he saw that he was putting food on it. A lot of food. He set it down before Techie again only when it was absolutely impossible to get more food onto the plate.

"Enjoy. You don't look like you've had a lot of nutritious food lately."

Techie blushed a little at that, though he didn't know if it really was supposed to be an insult or just an innocent remark. After all, he knew that he wasn't exactly the most healthy-looking person around, no matter how many times Krel would tell him that he was pretty.

He looked down on his plate, trying to decide what he should try first. He was not used to this kind of variety. Of course, he hadn't actually been hungry a lot in the time he had spent by MaMa - everybody in MaMa's gang ate the same, and the same amounts, though some people had had double privileges. But even with a normal ration, he'd always had enough. But that had been grub, grey food that had tasted as dull as it had looked, completely incomparable to this.

He finally decided on a little glazed cube of meat, and slowly, reverently lifted the fork to his mouth. When his lips closed around his bite, he malfunctioned - or at least, it felt as if he was malfunctioning. His eyes gave a helpless, disoriented whirr before they fell shut as the taste exploded in his mouth, pleasure shooting through his face and down his back, tingling the skin from the tip of his head to the soles of his feet.

He started chewing as in trance. If his tear ducts hadn't been fucked up, he was sure that he'd have been crying.

He swallowed, and his hand shot to his mouth, as if he couldn't believe what had just happened.

"Fuck..." he muttered as he opened his eyes again.

Kolka and Krel were both staring at him.

It took him a second to process this fact, with the taste of that meat still lingering on his tongue, but when he understood what had just happened, and that both of them had been watching him, were still watching him, the blood rushed to his face with the same speed as the pleasure that had flushed his body just a second ago.

"Uhm," he made, not sure what to say, and then covered his eyes with his hand so he wouldn't have to see the two of them. What the fuck had he been thinking???

Nothing, to be honest; he hadn't been thinking, just feeling, tasting, enjoying...

"Stars," Kolka muttered, then there was a hand at his wrist and his face was naked again. Kolka was grinning at him, giving his wrist a gentle squeeze.

"So, do you like the food?"

Krel let out an explosive peal of laughter at that, then she slapped Techie's back, which hurt quite a bit even though it seemed to be meant in a friendly way.

"You are so wrecking sweet", she cooed, then she ruffled his freshly washed hair. "If you make that face when you're coming, I might have to rethink the whole 'Not into humans' thing, to be honest."

Techie covered his face with his other hand. "I'm so sorry," he whimpered "I just... I-I was just surprised..." He really didn't want her to rethink anything to be honest; just why was he so stupid? Why couldn't he ever control himself?

Kolka snorted and let go of his wrist, petting his hand. "It's perfectly alright. We have some really, really good cooks here. Even though some people don't appreciate them." He raised his eyebrows at Krel, who just shrugged and popped another piece of her greyish bread into her mouth. He turned back to Techie and picked up the fork he had dropped next to the plate at some point, pressed it into his hand.

"Come on, keep eating. You might not be as surprised by the second bite as by the first, but the other things on your plate are pretty good too."

Suddenly he was leaning closer, and the hand that had just touched his own ran up farther, fingers tickling the inside of his elbow, then it was at his shoulder and running down his back.

"I do insist that you finish the plate," Kolka said lowly, and Techie nearly choked as cold, new, unexpected fear cut through the heat of his embarrassment. "Are you going to do that for me?" That hand was at his hip now, squeezing him through his new trousers. "Say 'yes, my lord'."

Suddenly, he wasn't hungry anymore. He stared at Kolka openly for just a second, before all of his instincts kicked back in and he lowered his head, nodding. "Yes, my lord," he whispered.

He saw the disapproving look Krel was giving Kolka from the corner of his eyes, but it didn't really matter right now. He had been given an order, the kind that had bad consequences if he didn't follow it - he knew the kind, he had grown up with it - and he did not want to face the consequences.

At least the hand vanished from his hips after a second squeeze.

But by the stars, the food was still so good... Every bite was a surprise, and even while he was still feeling Kolka's menacing heat beside him, he couldn't help the warmth that filled him as he kept eating bite after bite of meat, noodles, vegetables... He wouldn't have been able to tell what he was eating, to be honest, but the textures and aromas mesmerized him, coaxed little sighs out of him that he did his best to push down, though the other two were eating now as well and didn't seem to be giving him so much attention anymore. He could still feel Kolka's eyes on him every once in a while, but he tried to ignore him as well as he could. The order had been to eat it all, and at the moment that didn't seem to be such a difficult thing to do. He started by trying every different kind of food on his plate first, then he began to combine different flavors, try different sequences, wondering how it was that salty and sweet tasted so good together, or how the slight sting of a spicy piece of meat became so delicious when he paired it with one of the starchy yellow cubes on his plate. It was like discovering a whole new dimension of eating, as if what he had been doing up to now had been a completely different thing, as if he had only now found out what food was supposed to be, and he happily dove into his explorations.

But nothing as good as this would last, and he should have known that. He soon found that he wasn't feeling hungry anymore, and that he would like to stop eating. But that was not an option - his order had been very clear, and he would not disobey, not on his first day here, not when his new masters were so much more powerful than anybody he had ever seen. The more power somebody had, the worse they reacted to being disobeyed, after all. So he kept eating, alternatively trying to stuff the food down as fast as possible and slowing down to a crawl while he tried to force another bite into his stomach, which was now transitioning from a simple full feeling to a definite queasiness. He kept eating; he got to half his plate, to a fourth, to a fifth; he felt his stomach bulge, then he felt the first cramps; he took bite after bite while every bite before seemed to claw at his chest, while his stomach started hurting so badly that he could hardly sit straight. His face was hot, and he felt a familiar tingle at the back of his throat, a bright panic that didn't sit in his head, like usual, but in his neck, pulling down over his chest and his stomach and clawing into his flesh with every bite he forced down.

The last bite was the same kind of meat he had eaten at the beginning, and he was sure he had never tasted anything so disgusting. His stomach was hurting so badly, and he was still fighting against the cramps. He had to keep the food down... He had to be good... He had to be good...

Suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder, but it was small and soft and cool. He looked over to Krel, who was looking at him with a quizzical frown, as if she didn't understand what he had just done, and why he was basically writhing in pain. He cast Kolka a quick look; yes, he definitely knew what he had done.

That small, cool hand ran up and down his back.

"Here," she said and broke off a piece of her strange greyish bread. "This is going to help. Eat."

He frowned, but still took the piece of bread. How would eating more help his stomach cramps? But he was too distracted to think about it for too long, and too desperate to get rid of this pain, so he took the piece of bread and popped it into his mouth.

He had been wrong earlier. That last bite of meat had not been the most disgusting thing he had ever tasted. He did not know what exactly he tasted when he bit down on that piece of bread, but it was so vile, so horrible, that his stomach immediately started to empty itself into his mouth. He clasped one hand over his mouth and jumped from the bench, his body working on autopilot, trying to get away, get somewhere save, while he tried to keep himself from spewing. He didn't get far, but at least he managed to reach the corner so he wouldn't get anything on the two masters, before he broke and vomited the entire, huge plate of food onto the floor. He hardly noticed the warm hands that pulled his hair back behind his ears and held it out of his face.

Only when the last dry heaves had stopped and he was standing there, doubled over and breathing hard, did he notice the person behind him. New panic struck him as he pulled away with a start and stumbled towards the side, away from where he had soiled Lord Kolka's room, just far enough to the door that he noticed what he was trying to do and instead fell to his knees before his traitorous body could make him run away. He had done something horrible, indescribably nasty in the private room of one of his masters, and he knew that he needed to be punished. His brain was racing a mile a minute, jumping from excuses to pleas to self-recrimination to disgust with himself. Eventually, he didn't manage to get anything out, and so he just cowered on the floor, his head between his shoulders, a little ball of absolute mortification and panic.

"Hey," came Kolka's voice, though a lot softer than before. He could feel him kneeling down in front of him, but when he reflexively tried to jerk away a hand on his arm kept him there, and then the same warm fingers that had held back his hair ran over his head, his neck, his cheek, lifted his face up.

"Poor thing," he said with a frown that nearly - nearly - looked genuine. "That was a very cruel trick Krel played on you."

He pulled him to his feet and led him back to the table, where he handed him his forgotten glass of water. Eager to get rid of the acrid taste in his mouth, Techie emptied it in one go.

"That wasn't a trick, though," Krel said, arms crossed in front of her chest, frowning. "Whenever my stomach hurts, I hurl too. I mean, you do feel better now, don't you?"

Kolka had refilled his glass, and Techie took another little sip while he let his awareness slip down his body. He had been too panicked to notice it before, but yes - the ache was gone, and even though he still felt a little queasy and weak as a newborn, he didn't feel like he was about to die anymore.

He did nearly throw up again when he saw Krel take a huge bite out of that horribly disgusting bread of hers.

"H-how can you eat that?" he murmured, extremely curious but also extremely afraid of doing yet another thing wrong. But really, how could she eat something that just tasted so absolutely disgusting - like an unholy mixture of rancid meat and mold and earth.

"Chagrians don't have tastebuds," Kolka answered the question for her as he sat down again. "At least not the adult ones. I think your podlings do?"

"They do, yes. Though they're still not really picky. You just feed them raw meat and they're good." Krel took another bite.

Techie wanted to ask her if she had known how disgusting it was - but he was pretty sure she had, since she had fed it to him to make him vomit, apparently. He didn't know what to think about that. Lord Kolka had been undoubtedly cruel - he didn't doubt for one second that he had ordered him to eat all that to make him miserable - but there was no glee in Krel's face, just a little bit of worry. Had she really thought she was helping him?

Well, to be honest, she had helped him. He was feeling a lot better now, as a matter of fact. And apparently Kolka was not planning to punish him for vomiting in his corner...

Techie was just about to sit down again when both of the other two suddenly tensed. They lifted their heads in the air as if they were hearing something, then they both nodded in unison.

"Looks like you're going to meet Sizzly now. Master Kylo just called us for the debriefing," Krel said as she stood up, stuffing the last bit of bread into her mouth and swallowing it with hardly a chew.

Techie swallowed, glad that hardly any of the taste had stayed, though he was sure he was still smelling of vomit. "Who... who exactly..." he began, but fell silent again immediately. His gumption seemed to have run out by now.

"Sizzly is the head tech," Krel said as she opened the door and waited for Kolka and Techie to follow her outside. They walked through the painted hallways again, but not in the direction where the bow of the huge painted space ship was looming. He really wanted to know if it had eyes or if he had just been imagining things...

"Her workshop is also the security center of the Temple, so you'll likely be around her a lot. She's a bit rough around the edges, but don't worry, I'm sure the two of you will get along squeakingly." She grinned at that last bit, and Techie wondered if that was some kind of slang he didn't know - didn't you usually say 'splendidly' or 'great'?

They walked into a part of the Temple that had less bombastic wall paintings, and instead a lot more doors and metal floors instead of rock. They passed a few droids and two technicians who cast them brief glances from behind their goggles. They stopped at a door at the end of one of the hallways and Krel opened the door with her handprint.

"Hey Sizzly," she called cheerfully when she stepped into the room. "I think you’ll have to take a look at Kedesh's helmet, I think his vocoder's busted. Haven't heard a single word from him during the whole mission."

Techie just stepped into the room when a wrench came flying towards them. Techie immediately froze and would likely have been hit by the slightly off-trajectory wrench, but Krel's hand snapped up and she caught it as if it was nothing. She let it fall with a loud clatter and a grin, then walked farther into the room, motioning Techie to come with her.

"You really need to learn how to aim," she said, though Techie couldn't see who she was saying it to. A bulky droid was set up in the middle of a large room that had a wall of control screens on the one and a large, cluttered workbench on the other side. A clanking noise was coming from the deactivated droid, and then a noise that sounded like grunting. Krel motioned to him again and walked around the droid. Techie followed her obediently.

A small, hairy person was sitting behind the droid, working on some cables, ignoring them diligently, though Techie seemed to hear muttering coming from them.

"Sizzly," Krel said, a little louder this time. "This is Techie. You're to find some work for him. He did security at the complex we went to today."

Another grunting sound, then a strange, rough voice that Techie couldn't identify as male or female. "I don't need any more people working for me. We're full."

Something in Techie bristled, and it wasn't just the pang he felt at hearing that he 'wasn't needed.' The only techs he had known in his life had been slaves; that was just how it worked where he was from, so a tech disagreeing with a free person just wasn't a thing that was done. And Krel might be cruel in her own, inconsiderate way, but seeing her disrespected like that made something in his stomach turn.

But Krel just rolled her eyes and tapped the small person's leg with the tip of her boot. "It's Kylo's orders. He's good, you'll like him, I promise. His protocols found us far faster than they usually do at that kind of places." She lowered her voice a little. "Even despite your cloaking work."

Now the small person let go of the cables they had been working on, and turned around. Techie couldn't help jerking back a little. He didn’t quite know what he had expected, but he definitely hadn’t expected this very hairy person in goggles, with a pushed-in face and a round, big snout like a pig.

The pig person seemed to notice his look. "What's the matter, red?" she asked, looking him up and down. "Never seen an Ugnaught?"

"N.... No... I'm s-sorry..." Techie stuttered out, mortified. If he had to work with - or for - this person, then he had really just made a great first expression, hadn't he?

"Anyway, we'll leave him with you. You'll find something to do with him, I'm sure," Krel said, then she walked towards the door, where Kolka was waiting for her. "Play nice now, you two."

Techie looked on helplessly as the door closed behind the two of them, leaving him alone with this strange little person who turned around and resumed their work on the droid. No matter how afraid he was of more incidents like the vomiting thing, he still felt like he knew Krel to some degree now - he definitely knew her better than anybody else here - and he didn't want to be left all alone. Especially not with somebody who didn't seem to want anything to do with him.

Since Sizzly didn't seem to be interested in saying anything to him, he slunk back into a corner by the security screens. He let his eyes run over them for a while, trying to make sense of the symbols and the layout, but finally he just started staring off into space, wondering what was going to become of him. What if there really was no work for him here? What would they do to him? What would happen if he turned out not to be useful after all?

"Are you planning to play statue all day? If not, get me that wrench. I need it."

Techie's gaze shot back to Sizzly, who was still not looking at him. He scrambled to get to the door where the wrench was lying and picked it up before he went back and knelt down next to the Ugnaught to give it to them.

They took it without looking and started to screw some things in.

"I threw it because Lady Krel's been making that fucking joke ever since I asked if I shouldn't put a vocoder into Lord Kedesh's helmet when I first came here." They grunted again and put the wrench down. "Get me that laser knife on the workbench, the two inch one."

Techie jumped back to his feet and rushed over to the workbench, searching through the chaos there for a second before he found what they had asked for. He brought it back, and this time Sizzly grunted when they took it, and it nearly sounded like a 'thanks'.

"B-but..." He cleared his throat. If he was going to work with this person, he had to be able to speak with them. "What's wrong about that? I-isn't a helmet without a vocoder kind of..." 

"He's mute, that's why. Went crazy one day and cut half his jaw clean off."

Techie couldn't help but stare again. "He... what?"

"You live here long enough and nothing they do is really strange anymore," the Ugnaught answered, then they finally turned to him and took off their goggles. Their eyes were small and beady, and they looked him over critically. Techie still couldn't tell if they were female or male, even with the goggles off.

"What kind of asshole made your bionics?" they asked, grunting again. "That's hands-down the worst work I've seen since my junkyard days."

Techie felt a blush coming on. "Uhm..." He looked at the droid, trying to get the flush under control. "I don't really know... I didn't ask for them, exactly."

Sizzly grunted again, then pulled the goggles back down. "So, is your name really 'Techie'? Really?"

He shrugged slightly. "That's what I've been called. It was 'boy' before, so that's kind of an improvement..."

"That tattoo is also pretty fucking ugly," Sizzly said as they finished realigning a part of the droid's inside.

Techie flushed again. "I'm sorry..."

Sizzly grunted, then they looked at him again. "It's 'she', by the way. Most Ugnaughts go by 'he' when they're talking in common, but I don't, so remember that. Just so you know."

He frowned slightly at that. "What do you mean, 'go by'?"

"I mean that this whole gender thing is a lot different with us than with you tall naked monkeys, and we don't have words like 'she' or 'he' in our own language." She carefully closed the panel inside the droid she had been working on. "Most of you people think we look like 'he's, which is absolute bullshit. I mean, you don't look like a 'he' and still you are, right? So, I'm 'she'. It's that simple."

"Alright," Techie said, though being told he didn't really look male did sting a bit. He had always felt like a boy, even despite his obvious differences and his admittedly soft and annoyingly hairless face. But he was pretty sure that she hadn't really meant anything by it, so he decided not to think about it too much.

Sizzly was now connecting a new conductor end to the burned out wire she had been working with earlier. “So, tell me what kind of work you’ve done before. If I have to find you work, I’ll need to know what you can do.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another long-as-fuck chapter. Comments are always appreciated <3

When Krel came back to get him again, he had started working on his first little project in his new position. Well, 'work' was too big a word. Sizzly had told him to get acquainted with their security system, so he was now looking up all the documentation he could find. Apparently the Temple did not have its own security expert per se, just some techs that shared the job, and even though Techie didn't feel like he could call himself an 'expert', he still knew quite a bit about how to find the weaknesses in any system and repair them. There had been many, many attacks by other clans during his time with MaMa, and he had learned quickly.

He didn't even want to think about what would have happened if he hadn't.

Krel walked into the room just when he was trying to find out how long it would take to give the whole system a good check-up. Techie immediately jumped to his feet, while Sizzly blissfully ignored both of them - by now she had finished with the inner life of the droid and was now repairing a broken finger on its four-pronged hand.

"Come, you've got a doctor's appointment," she said with that little grin that he was already starting to get used to. He just nodded and followed Krel outside.

But before they could walk farther than a few feet, another person who was still wearing the robes all of the Knights - he had learned that word from Sizzly - had worn earlier. He couldn't say which one he was, though he was tall and very young-looking, with long black hair and a very strange, long face. His nose was huge, and his mouth and chin seemed to be a little lopsided, as if something had punched him so hard that it had gotten stuck a quarter of an inch to the side.

"Go and clean your weapons, Krel," the man said. "I'll take him."

Techie tried to fit the voice with those of the Knights he had heard talking, but he couldn't quite place it. So when Krel bowed and said: "Yes, Master Kylo," he had to take a double take. _This_ was the Master of the Knights? The one who had decided that he would be allowed to come with them? Who had de-escalated that fight between Krel and - what was her name, Kull?

But he looked hardly older than Techie! He was definitely younger than Krel, and very likely younger than Kolka too. How was that even possible?

Krel gave his hair another pet. "Be good now," she said, then she turned to walk away in the opposite direction they had been heading in.

"Come," the man - Master Kylo - said and turned around to lead the way, and Techie followed obediently about three steps behind him. The Knight Master's cape and robes were moving with every step of those impossibly long legs, and Techie was mesmerized by the sight. If he was able to lead all these people at such a young age - if that wasn't some kind of magic illusion of youth - then he had to be incredibly powerful, right? Like how MaMa had taken over so many other clans because even though she had been a slave herself at one point, she had been the most ruthless and the most intelligent among them.

If cruelty and cunning got you to the top of a criminal clan, then what had it taken Master Kylo to get to the top of this... organization of insanely, magically powerful people?

A little shiver ran down his back. Powerful people were dangerous people; he had learned that from MaMa, and Krel's and Kolka’s actions hadn't exactly disproven it. Suddenly he felt even smaller under these high, domed ceilings. Everything he had, everything he was, depended on this man in front of him, and he didn't know how to deal with the knowledge that he was in the same place as the man who had led seven people to fight and beat seven hundred in two hours. If he was that dangerous in battle, how dangerous was he outside of it?

~*~

By the time they reached the medical tract, their little newcomer was radiating anxiety so strongly that Kylo didn't even need to look for his presence in the Force to feel it. He did wonder what had brought that on - was he afraid of medics, maybe? - but he didn't try to probe into his mind. He would have enough time for that once the medic would be busy with his bloodwork.

Tall double doors swung open in front of him and they entered the medical tract. They didn't have as much need for medical services as the Finalizer, for example, since the only people who actually fought here were the Knights themselves. There were guards here, of course, but he could absolutely not imagine anybody being stupid enough to try and break into the Temple of Ren. There were so many technological and Force-created deterrents to intruders that even getting into the complex was basically impossible. And they had made sure that the guards they had chosen from General Hux' stormtroopers were force-sensitive enough to be able to use this environment and its unusual attributes to their biggest advantage. So the only people that really needed medical services, other than simple check-ups and things like cough syrup and pain killers, were the Knights.

As a consequence of this, the medical tract was a lot smaller than in most other institutions of the First Order. There were about five beds on one end of the long hall, and an examination area farther towards the door, with an examination bed, a body scanner, a few computer screens and all kinds of other utensils their medic needed. The bacta tanks were tucked away in another room to the side, and on the opposite wall a door led to the laboratories and the medic's office.

Kylo led Techie, who was taking in everything with a child-like mix of nerves and curiosity, to the examination table. The door to the medic's office opened nearly simultaneously, and the medic came out, dressed in the same black as the Temple Servants, complete with a mask, though the numerous devices she wore around her arms like broad metal armbands and her enhanced headset that recorded her procedures and did some of her diagnostics did make her stand out. A medical service droid, cone-shaped and chest-high, came rolling after her.

She stopped in front of them and gave Techie one long look before she said: "Log Five Eight Four Three, new patient, recently off-world, presents with obvious malnutrition, possible anemia. Red hair, about 5’8, bionic eyes, severe reddishness around eyes. Presented by Master Kylo Ren. Thorough examination commences.”

Even without the tentative probe he had established in Techie's mind - just enough to gauge his feelings - he could imagine that the doctor's first impression would unnerve the boy. It had definitely unnerved him when he had come here the first time. He had never liked people talking about him as if he wasn't in the room, and it was even stranger when somebody didn't even talk to anybody else. But back then he hadn't been self-assured enough to tell her not to do that, and by now he had gotten used to it. There was something pleasant about somebody who had trained herself to say all of her thoughts out loud.

The doctor's brown eyes crinkled a little at the corners when she came closer. She gave Kylo a quick bow, then she looked at the boy.

"Now, what kind of exotic diseases have you brought me, hm?" she asked, not even waiting for an answer - which Techie, who was looking at her as if he had just seen a Hutt tap-dancing, wouldn't have given anyway - before she told him to strip to his undergarments.

A flush crawled up Techie's neck, coloring his ears and cheeks with the same hue that came over Hux' face whenever Kylo managed to really, really rile him up. He had never seen Hux flush with embarrassment, but he did wonder if it would look anything like Techie blushing...

He didn't disobey, even though he didn't seem to like the thought of undressing very much. Had it bothered him as much when he had been bathed by Krel?

Kylo watched as his tunic came off, revealing an expanse of creamy skin over a soft chest and belly. There were the tiniest freckles everywhere down his shoulders, chest and hips, though his belly was nearly white. Again Kylo couldn't help but think of Hux. This was also something he had never seen him do, and for some reason he was pretty sure that even if he had a similar pattern of freckles, they would cover a body marked by life-long discipline and care; a care which this boy likely had never experienced.

When he took the tunic off completely and handed it to the medic, who put it on a little table nearby, Kylo saw that there were several scars along his back. Not like whipping scars - he had seen those before - but a plethora of different ones. A couple of burn marks on his shoulder, a knife wound along the small of his back, something that looked like scratches from claws by his shoulder blade... It wasn't as shocking as other people he had seen, whose whole backs had been crisscrossed with wounds, but he did wonder about his scars nevertheless.

Techie took off his boots now, then his socks and finally his trousers. When he clambered onto the examination table, like the doctor ordered him to do, Kylo could see that ancient scars had left white, nearly round marks on his knees, as if he had fallen badly at some point.

His thighs, though, were absolutely flawless. They were freckled as well, though the skin became pure white at the insides of his thighs, of which he could only see a slip as Techie laid down on the table. There was a certain roundness in his hips, which made his thighs big and soft looking, as if they'd feel like silk to the touch. He wondered if Hux had those same beautiful thighs... It was hard to tell even how big they were under his jodhpurs.

"Most of what we will do here will just be taking a look at you and then take some blood before I'll pop you in the body scanner," the doctor said as she put on a pair of gloves. "Your eyes are looking pretty bad. How long have you had those bionics?"

Kylo could see Techie swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. "Th-three years..." he mumbled so low that it was hardly audible, but the doctor nodded and repeated it for her report. "And how did you lose your eyes? An accident, a disease? An infection?"

The little flush that had been sitting on Techie's cheeks suddenly gave way to a nauseous, grey pallor. His eyes made that little whirring sound they sometimes seemed to make when he looked around, as his pupils became small and tight. "Uhm..." he made, his left hand twitching as if he wanted to do something with it but didn't know if he was allowed to move. "It was... I... I didn't have a disease or... or anything. They were just..." A little pink tongue came out and left a wet spot on those pale lips, "... removed."

The doctor frowned. "I really need to know what happened if I'm supposed to treat you-"

"I think this information should be sufficient," Kylo said, in a tone that the doctor should understand as an order instead of a suggestion. She looked at him with chagrin in her eyes, but she still nodded obediently.

"Well, at least we'll not have to worry about any pre-existing conditions complicating this. But I have to say, my boy, your eyes do look horrible. Please close them for a second. I'm going to palpate them, you tell me when it hurts."

Techie seemed to have problems closing his eyes - his mechanical pupils buzzed around as his lids twitched downwards and back up, until he finally took a deep breath and closed them tight.

Kylo couldn't quite explain why, but he reached out to touch the boy's hair.

"It's alright," he said in a soothing tone he hadn’t heard on himself since after Kull's initiation. Techie's hair was softer than it looked. He let his fingertips run over one of his temples, and the boy’s eyes relaxed as he let out a little sigh.

The medic looked at him slightly confused, but then she turned to her patient and started to palpate the skin around his eyes. It was obvious that he was in pain as soon as the doctor's fingers touched him, but he needed another reminder of the medic that he needed to be honest with her and actually tell her when he was feeling pain. Eventually she told him just to say 'yes' or 'no' whenever she got to another point, and that finally worked.

When the doctor finally stopped, she was frowning. "You can open your eyes again," she said as she exchanged her latex gloves. "I will have to look at your inflammatory factor once I do the bloodwork, but I am pretty sure that the tissue around your eyes is infected, and has been infected for a while now. Those bionics are either a wrong size for you, or you had open wounds inside your eye sockets when they were implanted, or... really, there are a myriad of things that could have gone wrong."

Techie lowered his gaze, as if he was ashamed - and really, when Kylo felt into him a little, he did feel a sense of guilt. But why? Did he feel it was his fault that he had lost his eyes, or had he insisted on those bionics without thinking about their quality? He really needed to go deeper into him soon. After the examination.

"I absolutely recommend that you have them taken out and replaced," the doctor continued. "You-"

"No!"

This time, Techie interrupted the medic, much to the surprise of all three people present, including Techie himself. He immediately blushed up to his ears again, before he said in a low voice. "I-I'm sorry, it's just... I... Please, don't take them out..."

The medic frowned again, and this time, Kylo could feel himself mimicking her. 

"This infection could spread to your brain," the doctor said slowly. "It's a miracle that it hasn't already. We need to get rid of it, that is not a question or a suggestion. And the most effective way to make sure that it goes away and doesn't come back is to get your eyes out, scrape out the infected tissue, put some tissue regrowing agent in there and then give you proper, new, fitted bionics."

Techie's emotions felt like those of somebody who was close to tears, even though his bionics weren't wet and couldn't get red.

"No, please... I don't want to have them..." His voice broke, and now he did reach up to his face, covered his eyes as if to hide his tears or his bionics. He was shivering now as well.

Kylo was surprised to find that he felt pity for him. 

"You say it's the 'most effective way’," he said to the medic, who looked at him again, this time with a mix of annoyance and resignation. "So there must be other ways as well."

The woman sighed and gently pried Techie's hand away from his face. "I can give you antibiotics and other medication. You would have to be careful not to exert yourself while you take them, though, and there could be unpleasant side-effects. You're very likely to experience intestinal discomfort, and you might get rashes. All in all a small price to pay to get rid of the infection, but that outcome is very much not guaranteed."

"I-I'd rather do that," Techie murmured.

The medic nodded. "You can always change your mind. I'm just telling you, even if the medication is enough to get rid of your infection, those bionics will have to be replaced at some point. Even the best-quality products have a life expectancy of less than twenty years, and I can't imagine that yours will keep longer than five or seven years."

Techie nodded slightly, not looking at any of them.

The medic continued her examination by looking in his mouth, ears, nose, palpating his chest and abdomen, checking his fingers and nails and asking him about any discomfort he had when moving or sitting or lying down.

“Alright,” the doctor said once that was done. “Please take off your underwear now, I’ll just take a quick look before I’ll take a blood sample.”

Techie sucked his lower lip into his mouth and seemed to bite down on it. “I-is that… necessary?” he asked in that tiny voice Kylo had heard quite a few times now.

The medic just nodded. “What did I tell you earlier? I need to know everything relevant, or I can’t treat you properly.”

“I-it’s just…” Techie struggled to sit up, and Kylo assisted him with a hand on his shoulder blade. He couldn’t resist the temptation to spread his fingers a little, feel that soft, goose-skinned flesh.

Techie blushed even harder at the touch and pulled his knees towards his chest. “It’s just that… I’m not…” His mumbling now became so low that neither Kylo nor the doctor could understand it, so the doctor leaned forward with another frown on her face.

“You’re not, what?”

Techie hid his face against his knees for a moment, before he said a little louder. “I’m not normal down there…”

“Aah,” the medic said with a nod. “That’s why you’re so stressed by this. Come on, I’ve treated about twenty different species of alien in my time, whatever you’ve got there won’t shock me. And it won’t shock Master Kylo either.”

Techie looked up at him from the corner of his eyes with such a shy expression that Kylo could feel it burning through his stomach. If Hux had ever looked at him like that, he wasn’t sure if he would have been able to keep himself from pushing him against a wall. 

Techie's Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat once, and then he averted his eyes again, looking down to his knees as he lifted up his butt and pulled off his underpants.

From Kylo's perspective, he couldn't really see anything strange about Techie's crotch, even when he spread his legs a little to let the medic get a closer look. His cock was rather on the small side, though not unusually so. Though when the medic's gloved hand carefully lifted up that small member, he did notice that something seemed to be missing.

The doctor made a humming, contemplative noise that made Techie tense up even more. His knuckles were turning white by now. But there was no surprise on the medic's face when she adjusted her headset a little with the ball of her left hand.

"Looks like perineal hypospadias," she said and changed hands so that she could hold his penis up while the fingers of her right hand gently touched the area below it, which was distinctly lacking in testicles.

"Like... what?" Techie's voice broke into a little squeak there.

"Perineal hypospadias," the doctor repeated, still looking at Techie's crotch. "It's one of quite a number of alternative genital configurations. A little unusual, but not dangerous. Though people did use to try and surgically change these configurations into one of the two 'common' ones, which can turn a little anomaly into a crippling injury. A bit like cutting out a birthmark with a rusty knife, but that's neither here nor there."

Techie's Adam’s apple was jumping in his throat now. "There are... there are other people who are like that? I mean, if it has a name..."

"Of course." The doctor patted his thigh reassuringly. "I mean, everybody's body is absolutely unique, but there are plenty of people with hypospadias, whether perineal or otherwise, and other alternatively configured genitals. It is a little unusual that your testes seem to be ever so slightly internal, so your sack looks a little like labia, but having a penis and a vaginal-looking structure with a urinary opening at the top is not all that uncommon. I guess the vaginal structure is not very deep?"

Suddenly Techie blushed up to his ears, and Kylo could only imagine what kind of memories were going through his head right now. He itched to get in there again, but that would come soon enough.

"Uhm... yeah," he muttered, and the medic nodded before she took off her gloves and tossed them into an opening in her assistant droid, before she put on a fresh pair.

"I will take a closer look at this and at everything else once I have the images of your body scan. Just, if you ever have any kind of issues at all, whether it's unusual discharge or bleeding or pain, come and see me. I'm here pretty much all the time." Her eyes smiled at him reassuringly and the mask twitched a little around her mouth, and he nodded slightly. He still looked as shy as a newborn rabbit, and his nakedness just seemed to accelerate that.

By all stars, he was pretty, though. Just that curve of his ass that was visible as he was sitting on the cot was enough to make Kylo's fingers itch to touch that freckled skin and find out if it was as velvety-soft as it looked.

But now the blush drained out of Techie's face, and when Kylo followed his eyes to the medic, he understood why. The medical assistance droid had just broken out a syringe from the end of one of his arms and was coming closer to Techie.

"MA Zero Three Three Eight is going to take your blood now," the doctor said. "Please just lie down and try to relax. It's going to be a little unpleasant, but I have programmed her myself and she can take your blood with far more precision and far less pain than any humanoid could."

That didn't really seem to be calming Techie down, but he still lay down on the cot on his back. His open-eyed, nearly panicked gaze was fixed on the high ceiling of the room, and his hands were balled into fists. Kylo could even see a vein standing out on his neck.

The droid put a little band of fabric around Techie's upper arm and pulled it tight, and just like the loop Techie also became tighter, tensing up to the point of cramps. The doctor tutted slightly and tried to get him to relax by simply telling him to relax, which did work about as well as Kylo would have expected.

When the needle was coming closer and Techie kept looking like his muscles were about to rip at any moment, Kylo finally went into a crouch next to the cot and sent a force command into Techie's ear. "Relax."

It was one of the first times he could remember that anybody had actually looked relieved to follow a force command. The boy's muscles immediately loosened, and when Kylo stood up again he saw a slightly vacant, blissed out expression on Techie's face.

Stars… Kylo needed to look away from his face and to the droid who was now putting the needle against his skin. Even with his slightly swollen face and badly infected eyes, Techie was far too beautiful for his own good at this moment…

That beautiful face only gave the tiniest of twitches when the needle broke skin.

"Better than any tranquilizer," the doctor murmured appreciatively while she entered some commands into a small screen at the back of her droid. The needle was pulled out again eventually, and the non-syringe hand of the droid sprayed a liquid against the tiny wound, which closed it up immediately.

The command was wearing off, and Techie's eyes started whirring again. He seemed to be a little disoriented, as if he had gone to sleep with his eyes wide open for just a moment. Those blue, whirring bionics found Kylo soon enough.

"How did you..."

"I will explain later," Kylo said, then he nodded towards one of the large machines in the background. "I think the doctor will want you in the body scanner now."

"Indeed," the medic said as she dismissed her droid, who went to work beeping its way through whatever tests were happening inside of it. She helped Techie get off the cot, then she led him to the machine that Kylo was so familiar with already, and opened it with a press of a button. The upper half moved upwards with a low whistling sound, and then she helped Techie lie down inside.

"Do you have any issue with confined spaces?"

Techie shook his head, though he did seem to be nervous again. This time, Kylo would let him face his nerves on his own though. Even if he would fidget a little, he wouldn't impede the process, and the scanner wouldn't hurt him.

To be completely honest, he was already regretting his choice to use the Force on something so banal as to calm down somebody. It felt far too... helpful a thing to do. Was he being tempted by the Light Side again, tempted through the medium of Techie's sweet innocence, or was it Techie's resemblance to the man he had so long longed to possess that made him behave in such a way?

He would have to meditate on this later.

The body scanner whistled and whirred throughout his inner tumult, until it finally came to a stop with a single, long beep. The top opened again, and Techie emerged, a little bit more pale than he had been before, but otherwise unharmed.

"Very well," the medic said, pushing a few buttons on the machine again. "You can sit on the examination table while I take a look at your test results. I won't be too long."

And with that, she vanished back through the door through which she had come at the beginning of the examination.

Techie looked up at Kylo with that shy, nearly pathetic expression on his face. Kylo nodded towards the table.

"I would like to undertake a little examination of my own. It might be best if you sit down on the table for that, like the doctor said."

That earned him a slight frown, and then a widening of blue, unnatural eyes as Techie imagined what he might mean with 'examination'. Kylo just shook his head and herded him back to the table.

"You asked me earlier what I had done to relax you so. What I have done is use the Force to command your mind into relaxation."

"The... the Force?" Techie whispered, confused and maybe awed by the mere mention of a magic that could command another's mind. He wondered if he had ever heard of the Jedi. But on the kind of world he had found him on, the Jedi would likely have been hardly more than a distant legend even at the time of their greatest power.

"The Force is the power in all that is," Kylo explained slowly. "The Knights of Ren, whose Master I am, use it to further the glory of the First Order, and of our Supreme Leader. Do you understand that?"

Techie nodded quickly, anxiously, his large eyes full of something like intrigued fear now.

"Good. And by the grace of Lady Krel, you will be a servant of the Temple of Ren. She has shown you a great mercy indeed."

Techie lowered his head and nodded slightly. "I.. I know. I am very grateful to L... to Lady Krel." His voice sounded high-pitched, as if he was fighting to keep his fear out of his voice.

"Do you know anything about your own heritage? Do you know where you have been born?"

"Not... Not really," Techie answered, a touch of red spreading into his cheeks, as if he was ashamed of not being able to answer appropriately. "I... My earliest memories are of my first master's house, and I didn't have parents or siblings there..." He swallowed, and an enticingly pink tongue flicked over his lower lip. "My... Uhm... One of the older slaves there, he told me that I had been bought when I was just able to walk... But before that..." He shrugged. "I don't know anything."

Kylo nodded slowly. "Very well. There are ways for me to find out things that you might not remember, but that are still hidden somewhere in your most distant memories."

Techie looked up again. "R-really?"

"Beside many other powers it gives us, the Force allows us to look into the mind of other beings." Techie looked up at that, and understanding dawned on his face. Interesting. Had Krel already taken a look into his head?

"I would like to take a look into your mind. Into your memories. If you allow me to enter your head, it will be entirely painless. If you fight against it, it will be deeply unpleasant."

Techie's eyes whirred again, and his Adam’s apple did another jump. He seemed to be thinking, and Kylo let him contemplate for a few moments. The doctor would be gone for quarter of an hour at least; he had time.

"C-could you..." Techie finally started, looking up at Kylo's face for just a moment before averting his caught-rabbit gaze again, "... could you maybe... m-m-make me relax again, M-Master?”

Kylo couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows at that. This was the first time anybody had asked him to actually use mind control on them. On the other hand, he had used it to help him earlier, to make something less unpleasant for him – something he had also never done before, as far as he could remember. It seemed bizarre, really. Like a tendril of light wriggling its way into his mind, warping his powers…

He was weak. And he would have to meditate on this later. But for now, he wanted to know where Techie had come from, if there was any connection to General Hux that he could find in the recesses of his memories. And be it weakness or strengthening remnants of his own light past, he did not like the thought of hurting Techie when he was so eager to please.

“The correct way for you to address me is ‘my Lord’ or ‘Lord Ren’,” he said instead of just outright agreeing with the boy; and he regretted it just a moment later, as Techie immediately pulled his head between his shoulders and looked down at the floor again.

“I… I’m sorry, m-my Lord…” he answered in a high-pitched, fear-infused voice. Kylo was rather sure that Techie expected punishment – his fear was so palpable that he would have sworn he could smell it in the air.

“Look at me,” Kylo commanded, and Techie’s eyes immediately jumped up. Taken by a sudden impulse, Kylo put his hand on the top of the boy’s head, gripping his hair and pulling back so that Techie was forced to expose his throat to him. He looked at him for a moment, watched the pulse beat under his dry skin, watched as he started to shiver in expectation of his punishment – then he leaned down to his face, looked deep into those whirring eyes and whispered: “You will relax now.”

Immediately his pupils dilated with a gentle hum, and Techie’s body went slack and heavy in Kylo’s grip. For a second Kylo felt himself accosted by images – of him laying Techie out on the cot, ripping off his own clothes, taking his body while he was completely, blissfully helpless under the force command – but he shook his head quickly to divert those thoughts. All those nights fantasizing about the General in such a position must have left a lasting imprint on his imagination, and now that he had such a look-alike as Techie in his power, it was likely just natural that his mind would appropriate those fantasies to the situation. He was not actually developing feelings for him – it was just his red hair and his familiar face and his naked, freckled skin that made him want to use him just like he wanted to use Hux.

He took a slow, centering breath, then he let his mind reach out, slipping from the realm of the visible, finite, into the pure Force. His eyes closed of their own accord as he would not need them for the time being. Techie's presence in the Force was clear before him, the same kind of wavering, weak light as that of all without Force sensitivity. Kylo could see the motions of his active mind; gentle undulations that were so regular as they could never have been if he had not put him under his command. The mellow waves let him in without any kind of resistance, and he perceived the calmness that he had given Techie all around his own being.

He remained in this calm, thoughtless space for a moment, then he started to push through the active mind and down towards his memories.

He found his most recent memories first - the inside of the body scanner, the confusion when he had returned from his first state of force-commanded relaxation, screens upon screens of information in the tech hub, Krel...

He pushed deeper, faster. What had been like running his hand through soap bubbles at first became more like loose sand, then soil as he dug deeper and deeper. He tried to pay the snippets of memory that were flying past him as little mind as possible; he needed to access the parts of Techie's memory that he was not aware of anymore, and he would know when he'd come to that part. In the meantime, he rather did not want to know about all the pain that the boy had gone through in his life as a slave. He did not want to know how he had gotten his bionics or his scars, he did not want to know the suffering within his childhood memories. He couldn't afford to feel even more sympathy with this boy, and he was sure that his weakness wouldn't let him ignore the suffering of a child while he was inside his mind. He needed to get all the way into the intricacies of his memory without letting his pain and tears get anywhere near his heart. He had to be strong enough to do that. He was a Knight of Ren, for the Force's sake. Darth Vader had killed children the day he had accepted the Dark Side; Kylo Ren would not shame his grandfather's legacy by getting moved by suffering so banal that it was happening all over the galaxy at any given day. He was above this. He was – 

He hit the wall so suddenly that he nearly jolted out of the trance he had put himself in to get inside the boy's mind. As far as Techie was aware, there was nothing past this part of his memory, but Kylo needed to get behind this wall, to see if there was any hint behind the rock face of oblivion to whether Techie was anything to Hux.

He had only gone this far into another person once. That time, he had broken the wall down with the sheer power of his will, but it had left the holder of those memories with a wound to his mind that could not be mended. This time, he would be more careful.

Instead of calling upon the Force to destroy, he let his own mind melt into the mind of his host. For just a moment, he WAS Techie. Images came tumbling in on him, memories and fantasies and obsessions and fears, but he let them glide through him without paying them any heed. Then he pushed again, and a moment later his mind returned to its own self again, behind the wall that separated the memories Techie's mind let him see and those it had locked away.

There was a lot of debris - the kind of memories that might one day become useful to Techie or just randomly appear in his active mind again, but mainly things he had 'forgotten' because he just didn't need to remember them - but he pushed his way through all those useless images, until he finally found the old, pale memories he had been looking for. He eased himself into them, and as he had done earlier, started pushing from those closest to this time back as far as he could go.

The memories he had entered unfolded before his mind’s eye as his freshest memories had before. He was in a ramshackle stone building, holding the hand of a person disguised with swaths of veils and shawls; a female voice was coming out of the shawls, speaking in hushed tones with a woman as run-down looking as the house. They were talking about money; about discreetness, about making him vanish. Then the veiled woman put her hand on his back and pushed him forward, towards the outstretched hand of the dirty stranger...

He pushed back farther, and the scene changed dramatically. A clean, sober living unit that looked to be at least inspired by Core World architecture, if not actually located on a Core World. White walls, white tables, white appliances. Everything was big through a small child’s eyes, but it was warm and nice and familiar, and the same voice was talking again, but this time there were no veils; just a middle aged human woman with black hair, stacking dishes in a washing unit. She closed the unit and came towards him, smiling, then lifted him up and walked to a window that overlooked the neat streets and white buildings of a city Kylo didn't know.

He pushed farther, but he kept watching and listening, trying to catch any trace of Hux' face, or of his name, or of anybody even saying the words 'General' or 'First Order'. But he did not find what he was looking for in those toddler memories, and finally he reached their end, or rather, their beginning, and they were still in this white apartment in this white city, and the dark-haired woman was smiling down at him...

He left Techie's mind with all possible care, and returned to his own body. Breathing out slowly, he ended his trance and opened his eyes.

Techie's eyes still stared ahead vacantly, but just a few moments later they whirred into action and the boy blinked, once again confused and disoriented - stars, Kylo was starting to like that look on him far too much - and then he looked up at Kylo.

"Did you..." he started, then swallowed before he started again: "Did you find something, my lord?"

Kylo's mind wandered back to the black-haired woman. How long ago had this been? How old was Techie now? With the bad use of his body, it would be difficult to say, but maybe the doctor would have answers for him. "No," he answered, and then he stayed quiet, thinking about what he had seen, about what other steps he could take to find answers.

Techie uttered a low "Oh" at that answer, then he dropped his eyes again.

They waited in complete silence until the medic's office door opened again.

The doctor was carrying a data pad in her hand, and her trusty droid was following her, beeping something in binary as she came back to the examination table.  
"As I thought, your inflammatory factor is very high. Your eyes are not your only source of inflammation, either. I've found a few stomach ulcers, and there might be an inflammatory site in your intestines. Also, you're pretty malnourished. Lots of nutrient deficiencies. But that was to be expected."

She turned to her droid, who gave her a little cassette it had been holding in one of his hands, and held it out to Techie. "The lid of this cassette works like a data pad. It will tell you which pills to take when, and give you reminders as well. For now, just take all the pills in it, and then you come back to me and we take another look at you."

Techie took the pill box with a look on his face that wasn't quite clear whether it wanted to be trepidation or apology, and nodded.

"Thank you," he said, without looking at the doctor, then he stood up from the cot and finally put his clothes back on. Out of some misplaced sense of modesty, he turned away from both of them as he did that, revealing a full view of that soft, freckled ass of his to Kylo. At this point Kylo felt too exhausted to fight off his fantasies, and he just indulged in an image of himself running a hand over those beautiful globes, groping them, opening them up...

Techie was dressed again far too quickly. Kylo turned around to the medic and acknowledged her work with a nod, then he left the tract, motioning Techie to come with him.

~*~

Too much had happened for Techie’s mind to quite catch up with it. He was so tired by now that he nearly fell asleep walking as they passed through the same corridors as before. There were so many things he wanted to think about, but his mind felt so sluggish, so done. He felt like an empty water pouch; there was hardly another drop he could ring out of himself. He wanted to lie down again, to close his eyes, to have just a few minutes for himself. When was the last time that he had slept? Two days ago? He really couldn’t remember at this point. He just hoped Kylo would lead him somewhere where he’d be able to sleep, so he could get some of his strength back.

There were just so many things he needed to think about…

But when they went through another door back into what he considered the Knights’ residential part of the Temple, loud voices pulled him out of the mire of his thoughts, and he perked up for a second as he tried to figure out who was shouting at whom. Kylo had heard it too, of course, and was now nearly a whole corridor ahead of him, walking so fast towards the tumult that Techie couldn’t keep up. When he finally crossed into the hall where whatever was happening was happening, he saw Krel and Kull standing close together, Kylo just beside them. Kull had one hand on the collar of Krel’s robe, and Krel was grabbing Kull’s upper arm, but both of them had stopped whatever they were doing – fighting, Techie guessed – and were looking up at Kylo.

"None of you better try to put the blame on the other," Kylo hissed as he pulled Kull's hand off Krel's cloak. Krel let go of her arm in turn and opened her mouth, but Kylo just cut her off with a swift motion of his hand. "If you need to fight, do it like Knights, not like school children."

Techie stood still at the corner of the corridor, trying to listen without being seen, especially by Kull, who was fortunately standing with her back to him.

He could see Krel's yellow eyes look from Kylo back to Kull, and a grin appeared on her face, a grin that looked more like a predator bearing its teeth to a rival. "Master Kylo is right, girl." Derisiveness dripped off the way she pronounced that word. "If you think you have a problem with me, you should face me like the Knight you allegedly are."

Kull's shoulders tensed and her hands balled into fists. "You..."

Kylo put a hand on her shoulder and shoved her farther away from Krel.

"A duel to first blood," he announced. "Tomorrow, first standard hour. The rest of the Knights will be watching. And since he seems to be the reason for this ridiculous squabble," he nodded back towards Techie, who immediately jerked back, "he will also be watching."

Kull turned around and gave Techie such a stare that he was damn sure his knees were going to collapse at any moment. "Why? Why would you let an insignificant piece of trash like that watch a Knights' Duel?!"

This time, Kylo had to hold Krel back, which he did by holding out his arm in front of her so she couldn't get at Kull. "Because he is obviously not that insignificant if two of the most powerful beings in the Galaxy are fighting like rabid dogs because of him," he snarled, then he turned to Kull and motioned towards the direction of the hall leading away from Techie. "I will see you tomorrow in the arena. Now, go."

Kull didn't spare Techie a second glance, but just stalked away, her dark coat billowing around her and her fisted hands shaking with rage.

The remaining Knights now turned and came back to Techie, who was feeling even more wretched now than he had before.

"I... I'm so sorry..." he whispered when they were in hearing distance. "I... I didn't want to make any trouble..." And to be honest, he was incredibly afraid of Kull. She was so powerful - what would happen if she decided to take her issues with him directly to him, instead of Krel? She would likely be able to kill him with hardly a flick of her finger...

"It's her making the trouble," Krel rumbled. "That's what happens when you start training them late. She's got no sense of humility."

Kylo cast her a warning look, but Krel just crossed her arms in front of her chest and stared back at him. They seemed to be communicating wordlessly, but even though everything in him fought against him speaking out when he was obviously not meant to speak out, the words slipped over his lips before he could do anything against them: "But why don't you just send me away? I-I mean, I am so, so, so grateful that you took me here, but... I just don't want to make trouble..."

Krel sighed and looked at him again, then reached out to ruffle his hair. "You're just the trigger, little fry. She is fairly new, and she hasn't learned her place yet, it seems. If we sent you away now, she'd always think she's got one up over me."

Kylo frowned again. "It's more complicated than that, to be sure. But yes, you are just a symptom. I have decided that you will stay here, and she must follow my will. I hope she will learn something from that duel tomorrow."

Techie frowned at that. But what if she won, he thought. Would that mean she could decide what would happen to him?

"No. First of all, she will not win, and second, Master Kylo's orders still stand. She has to follow those. The duel is just to let us let out some of our frustration on each other, and cement the hierarchy," Krel answered his unspoken question, and with what had happened in the med tract, he suddenly realized that she was reading his thoughts. It made his skin crawl, which again made him think about how she could obviously hear how uncomfortable it was making him, and he wondered if she would get angry for him at that - and again, she was able to read that as well, and –

Krel pulled a comm link out of her pocket and typed something. "I will call one of the other servants to take you to your quarters. He will also bring you back to Kolka in the morning, so you can have breakfast with the two of us."

Kylo nodded. "I will see the both of you at the first hour tomorrow."

With that he turned and walked down the same corridor as Kull.

"You look awful," Krel informed Techie as Kylo had vanished into another hallway. She angled her head a little, as if that would give her a better vantage point. "I take it the doctor gave you some pills? With what kind of dump we pulled you from, I really can't imagine that you're not full of unpleasant shit."

He blushed at that. He was actually pretty used to that kind of humiliating talk, but it was still pretty awful when a new person talked down to you like that. But he just nodded and pulled out his pill box to show her.

The ridge on Krel’s face where the eyebrows would have been on a human rose a little. "That's quite the box," she said, then she looked at his face again. "You better take those pills religiously, my little shrimp. Your former owners might have been alright with having somebody damaged do their security work, but the standards for a technician in the Temple of Ren are high. You will be expected to be hard-working, diligent and healthy. That is very much an order. Do you understand?”

Techie could feel his heart sink into his stomach, but he nodded. He tried not to think about what would happen if he forgot to take the pills.

Before Krel could say anything else, a servant came into the hallway. The man bowed before Krel, then he stood at attention, waiting for his orders without even looking at Techie.

“This is a new technician. A comm-link should be waiting for him; signature T 9750. Get him his comm-link and show him his room.” She looked at Techie for a moment, then said, “and get him a spot of dinner.” Techie could have sworn there was the slightest bit of amusement in her voice.

After the servant nodded, she turned to Techie. “I expect you in Lord Kolka’s quarters at the start of the cycle.”

Then she turned around and walked away, leaving Techie in the care of the half-masked servant.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Soooo it seems like I took a summer break without telling anybody? But I absolutely did not abandon this fic; like I said before, all of it is already written, and I just need to edit and post it. But with the last few weeks being filled with extreme heat and also a lot of work, I just couldn't get myself to actually sit down and do it.
> 
> Anyway, from now on I'm going to try and actually post every Friday again. And now, have fun! :)

The room Techie finally ended up in was a lot more cozy than any room he had lived in before, not least of all because he had the whole thing to himself. It struck him as a little peculiar that a technician would have his own room, but he had not been able to summon his courage and ask the servant who had brought him here whether this was normal. He also just generally didn’t want to seem like he was complaining – because he definitely appreciated having a whole room just to himself, with a door he could close and even lock. Beside a cast-iron bedframe with a very comfortable mattress and bedding that felt incredibly soft and smelled like soap, the room also had a locker-like cupboard filled with three changes of his uniform and two pairs of pajamas, a small bedside table, a little box with shoe-shining equipment and even a little desk, made from a piece of metal that had been screwed into the wall, with a chair in front of it. There were several power outlets that made him think that it might be possible to put a screen on this desk, too.

Compared with the nook in the server room where Techie had been sleeping during his time with MaMa, or the crowded slaves’ dormitory at his first master’s house, this was absolute luxury. But to be completely honest, he wasn’t in any shape to properly appreciate it at the moment. After taking a quick look into the cupboard and carefully putting down his new comm-link and pill box on the bedside table, he had taken off his shoes and pants and just fallen into the bed without changing into one of the pajamas.

But now that he was actually able, and supposed to, sleep, he just couldn't make his mind quiet down. Scene after scene replayed itself in his head as all the things he had learned and experienced today came barging in on him.

He still couldn't believe that the doctor hadn't been appalled by his abnormity. He couldn't believe that he wasn't a one-of-a-kind atrocity; that there was a name for what had gone wrong between his legs. But he also wouldn't have expected to be told that his bionics were killing him. That thought was a lot less consoling than thinking about how there were other people with his kind of body, but it was also so powerful that he couldn't keep himself from dwelling on it. Had MaMa known that this could happen? Had she ordered them to give him second-rate, and very likely second-hand bionics even though she knew that they would kill him in the long run? And what was he going to do now? He did not want to have his eyes taken out, not again; he knew it would not be as painful or as horrifying as it had been the first time, but he still did not want it. He just hoped that the pills would work. His eyes were his eyes, and even if they were badly fitted and hurt him and were killing him, he did not want to have them ripped out again; he did not want to be blind and in pain again, like in those horrible days after MaMa had removed his eyes and before they had found something to replace them with. He never wanted to live in that kind of darkness again. Even now, with the room being completely dark, his eyes produced a gentle glow that allowed him to see the metal tiles above his bed. He wouldn't be able to bear the darkness.

Fuck, he really wanted to sleep. He was so tired, his head hurt so badly, his eyes were burning like fire, and every bone in his body felt as heavy as if it had been dipped into molten metal, but he just couldn't get his mind to quiet down. He had managed to stop thinking about his eyes, but now he was thinking about the people here; about Krel and Kolka, about their hands on his body and their small cruelties - and the big ones. He remembered his incredible nausea, remembered every stinging word, but he also remembered the pools down in Krel's quarters, her gentle hands, her... had it been sympathy? He had felt as if it had been sympathy... He still could smell the soap on his hair, and he could swear he never felt so clean before, in his new clothes and his freshly washed blanket and his skin scrubbed free of every bit of dirt. And even if she had not stopped Kolka, she still had helped him with his nausea...

There were definitely worse people to belong to than her.

Kull, for example. He still wondered why his presence was riling her up so much. He was just a slave, an insignificant technician, and she was one of the most powerful beings in the Galaxy, he imagined. At least he couldn't imagine that there were so many people in the Galaxy who would be able to do what they - the 'Knights', he reminded himself - had done with MaMa's complex.

And then he remembered just how close he had been to being destroyed with the rest of the complex. He remembered Lord Kylo standing over him, looking down on him through his mask, he remembered the power that pushed him towards him - was that the same Force that Kylo had used to get inside his head? It had to be, right? Or did it have a different name when they used it to push things around instead of doing mind stuff?

Kylo had wanted to kill him, in any case. If not for Krel, he would not be alive. He owed her his complete loyalty for that alone. And here, he wasn't only alive, he was even being given medical treatment - he had gotten a whole box of medicine. The only medicine he had gotten when he had been with MaMa had been two pieces of pain killers after his eyes had been taken out, and he had been in debt to the guy who had gotten them for him for the next few weeks.

And Kylo had been so nice to him during the examination, too. He had helped him with the syringe, and he had kept touching him to calm him down. Nobody had done that in years. When he had been a child, there had been a few people who would pet his hair or hug him, and he cherished those memories, but every touch he had received with MaMa had been a threat, or pain, or while he had paid his debts or traded favors. And now two people had been touching him to comfort him, in one day, and both of them so powerful and so dangerous and so completely unreadable to him... After he had decided not to kill him, Kylo had been nothing but friendly to him, really, but he was the leader of the Knights, and they were so powerful, and how was it even possible that somebody who was the leader of people like that, people who could take out a town-sized complex within two hours, were that friendly to somebody like Techie?

Suddenly a thought came to him. It was such a ridiculous thought and Techie scolded himself for even having it, since he was so absolutely ugly, but what if Kylo... wanted him? There had been people in the complex, and definitely at his former Master's too, even though he had never really paid attention to it there, who had tried to get other people to sleep with them by being nice and doing things for them. Maybe that was the reason why Kylo was so nice to him? 

But why would Lord Kylo have to stoop to such tactics? He was a powerful man, and Techie belonged to him. And not just that - if he wanted, he could just command him to spread his legs, like he had told him to relax, and Techie would have no choice but to do it.

The thought sent a tingling sensation between Techie's legs, and he started to chew his lower lip as he felt the blood rush into his cheeks. Lord Kylo would have had plenty of chances to fuck him, if he had wanted. They had been in so many empty corridors together... Even without using his powers, he could just have pushed him against a wall, pulled down his pants and have his way with him. Or, if he didn't have any lube with him and didn't like it dry, he could have pushed Techie down and made him suck his cock. He was such a tall man, Techie was sure that he would have gagged on his cock, even though he would have been a good boy and opened his throat as far as he could to make sure Kylo enjoyed himself...

He very suddenly noticed that his hand was on his chubbed-up cock, and he immediately sat up in his bed. His cheeks were burning, and he rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. No. He couldn't think that. Krel and Kylo had already made it clear that they were reading his mind, and he was sure that the rest of the Knights would be able to do the same thing. He couldn't think about Lord Kylo like that, not if he was going to be around them for any length of time. It would be the utmost level of depravity and ingratitude, and he would just not be able to live with himself if everybody knew he had filthy thoughts like that. And what if Kylo didn't even think about him like that?

The room suddenly seemed tiny and stuffy, and Techie's legs were itching to move. He stood up and started pacing up and down, but it wasn't enough. The strange environment and the stress of the day and the panic of what would happen if anybody would find out about what a dirty pervert he was were crowding his mind. He needed space; he needed to get out of his room.

For a moment he hesitated. He had only been here for half a day, and he hadn't had any opportunity to explore the place on his own; what if he got lost? But then, he was sure there was a map on his comm-link, since there had been one on the one he had used in MaMa's complex, so he would just have to take it with him and he would be fine, right? The servant who had brought him here had said that the ‘fresher was at the end of the hallway; he’d just go there, have a pee, wash his face and then come back. That would be alright, he was sure of that. He was just going to go to the ‘fresher.

He put the comm-link into his pant pocket and opened the door of his room, then he stepped into the hallway. His bionic eyes could see through the darkness, though the shadows still loomed large. He looked down both ways, but couldn't find any indication of where the 'fresher was, so he just started walking into one direction. If he didn't find anything there, he'd just turn around and walk in the opposite direction.

What he had not realized earlier was that these hallways, similarly to the hallway leading to Krel's rooms, were slightly curved. He had seen an outline of the Temple in the data he had been looking at when he had been with Sizzly, and he knew that, behind a thick ring of defensive technology, the outermost part of the Temple held utility rooms, storage facilities, and the sleeping quarters of those who did not belong to the inner circle of the Knights. He tried to recall the exact layout of the Temple, but the map he had seen had been too big to really see the smaller details. The Temple was huge; filled with training facilities and laboratories and workshops and rooms that hadn't had any description in the data he had been given, just levels of importance, from one to ten. The core of the Temple was the only level ten area; his own clearance went to level six, though he was able to actually see the layouts of level seven and eight and would, as Sizzly had told him, be working on the security of these places as well. He had been a little surprised that level nine and ten apparently needed no special security, but then, who knew what Lord Kylo and the Knights were able to do, right?

He had been lost in thoughts for a few minutes before he noticed that he was still walking, but had still not found the 'fresher. Suddenly a chill ran down his spine. Had he walked around a corner? He couldn't quite remember, but he had the distinct feeling that he had walked around a corner. That wasn't good. That was absolutely not good.

He took out his comm-link and activated it - just to be greeted with a message to put in his number and then activate it with his fingerprint.

Techie remembered that Krel had told the servant his number, but what had it been? T something, right? T 94.... T 946? He tried the number, but the comm-link did not accept it. Panic started to rise in his chest as he tried different numbers, T 945, T 956, T 954, but none of them worked. He tried several random numbers, but that also didn't work; he tried to figure out whether he could get into the comm-link without his number, with some kind of trick maybe, but he soon figured out that the only way to hack this thing was to connect it with a different console and run a decryption program. And he had just as much of an idea of where to find a console as he had of which way was the way back.

He turned on his heels and walked back the way he had come from, but he soon found that the way parted into two different hallways, and he had no idea which one he had to take. He decided to take the left one, since that was the one leading towards the outward curve of the Temple, but as he kept walking and walking and walking through the corridor, he realized that he would have been back a whole while ago if he had taken the right way. So he turned around again, but then there were more forks in the hall, and he just didn't know what to do. His steps became faster as panic grabbed him, and suddenly he was sure that there was somebody behind him in the darkness, somebody or something, and instead of doing the reasonable thing and halting to ask that person for directions, he started running as adrenaline pumped through his body. He felt ice cold with fear as he rounded another corner, thinking about the fact that he was running in the wrong direction - towards the inside of the Temple - far too late. He couldn't stop himself, he just kept running, the noise of his feet following him like a predator on the prowl. He could see the faint outlines of paintings on the walls, but he did not take the time to take a closer look at them or find out what they were; he just kept running until the corridor ended in front of him.

His chest was burning and his breath came in hard thrusts as he stood still. After a last long gulp, he held his breath to hear if the noise he had heard had vanished.

For a moment everything was quiet – then, a low echoing noise, as if something had hit metal at the end of the corridor. His panic returned with a vengeance, and he turned around to take a closer look at the wall in front of him. There was a small, illuminated key pad – it wasn’t a wall after all, but a door. Maybe there was some kind of utility closet behind this door – maybe he’d be able to hide in there until the noise went away. He put his hand on the DNA scanner, praying that it would let him in, and then his heart did a somersault in his chest when the hydraulics hissed and the door slid open in front of him.

He squeezed himself through the door as soon as it had opened far enough; then he hit the closing panel. As the door closed behind him, Techie turned around to look at his surroundings, but even with the slight shine coming from his bionics, there was nothing he could see. The room appeared to be large, and empty. He couldn’t hear anything either, so he was likely alone in here. Still cautious and anxious, he took one step forward, but still the room seemed empty. He took another step into the room, then another, then another – 

And the floor gave out under him.

He was too startled to even scream as he tumbled down a chute, hitting his arms on the side as he tried to gain some kind of purchase. Then the chute ended, and he fell for a moment before something soft and moist stopped his fall.

He groaned in pain. He had fallen on his side and hit his elbow on the ground, and stinging pain was shooting up his arm and through his shoulder. In addition to that, a horrible odor was clouding his senses. It smelled sweet and sickly, disgusting like badly dressed wounds and old blood and uncleaned toilets. With a hiss of pain he sat up and took a look around. His bionic eyes could see the crude outlines of the room, at least the half he was in; the other half was bathed in total darkness. The room was similar to Krel’s quarters – hewn out of the rock, with a high, irregular ceiling. He looked back to where he had come from, and saw an opening in the wall behind him, about five feet off the ground. 

Suddenly a low growl came from the darkness, and then a sound like a server closet being set down. Techie felt as if his heart stopped, and his blood ran cold. The hair in the back of his neck stood up and a sickly bitterness rose in his throat as he slowly turned around. 

He did not know what he was seeing. He had no name for it. He had no concept of anything this big even being real. Not even in his nightmares had there been anything like that, anything with arms longer than a speeder and hands bigger than doors. None of his worst nightmares could have prepared him for that mouth, those teeth or the infernal stench that washed over him with every slow, noisy breath of the monster.

It made another step closer to him, slowly, as if it was surprised to find somebody in its layer. Techie tried to move back, but found that he couldn’t. His body was frozen, his arms and legs didn’t obey him. He was screaming in his head, but there was no sound coming from his mouth, not even a whimper.

A hand came for him, slowly and nearly hesitantly, two long, clawed fingers and two short ones, and still he was unable to move. His head began to swim when he felt the heat of the monster’s paw and smelled the foul skin so close to him, and then its strong grip surrounded his body, pressed his arms against his chest.

Just when it was too late, his body came back under his control. He still wasn’t able to scream, but a gargling cry fought its way out of his throat, and he started to thrash his legs about, since his arms were absolutely useless.

But not only his arms were useless; every bit of resistance he put up was just the same. It even seemed to have the opposite effect of what it was supposed to do: Instead of making the monster drop him, the grip got tighter, and in his panic Techie would have sworn that that disgusting, fang-filled, slavering mouth that dominated the head of the monster twisted into a grin.

The stench became overpowering as he was moved closer and closer to the monster’s maw. A sudden foul wind ran over his face, and he realized that the thing was sniffing him. He couldn’t do anything but clench his eyes shut and wait for the yellow, knife-like teeth to cut into his flesh.

But moments passed, and nothing happened.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the monster had turned its head towards the other side of the room. The grip around him tightened for a moment, then it opened, and he fell several feet onto the stinking, straw-strewn floor, landing on the same elbow as before and hissing with pain.

“Good,” a voice said from the other side of the monster, and then he heard steps approaching. The swirling seams of black, thick robes entered his field of vision, and when he looked up he saw Kylo Ren, his pale face standing out from the muggy darkness like the full moon on a summer night.

Techie felt his face crumble as the panic rigor of the last few moments melted and left him with nothing but raw, burning fear. Dry sobs started to shake his body, and he made an attempt to curl in on himself, but was stopped by Lord Ren, who grabbed his back and legs and lifted him into his arms.

Without any further word he walked around the monster, who was just staring at them, not even trying to reach out or hunt them down, and left the sty through a door that was far thicker than any of those Techie had seen in the Temple. Once they were outside and the door had closed behind them, Kylo let Techie go, but Techie did not feel like he could stand on his own already, and whether it was his swaying or another impulse on Kylo’s part, he felt strong arms around his quivering body almost instantly. He hid his face against the tall man’s chest and sobbed tearlessly into the rough fabric, until the tremors that shook him started to become less and less violent.

His whole body was hurting – from the two falls, from the tremors wrecking him – but the warmth that seeped through the thick robes of his savior pulled him back through the mist of pain and fear. But even when he had finally managed to make himself go still again, the arms didn’t vanish. On the contrary, he felt the grip tightening, as if Kylo was squeezing him.

“I… I…” Techie began, trying to apologize for being here, for getting in trouble, for making Kylo help him, but a gloved hand touched the back of his head and stroked through his hair and it took away his breath for a second.

“You don’t need to apologize,” Kylo said lowly. “You should not have been able to enter this part of the Temple in the first place. The doors shouldn’t have opened for you…”

Techie felt the burning need to apologize again, even though he knew that Kylo thought it was not his fault. And really, a malfunctioning of the security system was not his fault at the moment – in a week it might be but all he had done up to now had been to read up on it. There was no way he would have been able to find a flaw like that already. And still he felt like he had once again not done enough, like he had fucked up and deserved to be punished for it. It still felt like his fault. And stars, he was still so afraid. Just the thought that that beast was behind this door made him want to start sobbing again.

“I’ll take you to your room,” Kylo said, and then the warm arms around him vanished.

Techie nodded and took a tiny step back. Only then did he notice that the warmth had not vanished everywhere – there was still some of it between his legs. He looked down, and then immediately felt his face burn as he realized that he had pissed himself at some point when he had been in the monster’s room, and that Kylo had hugged him like this.

“I’m so sorry,” he squeaked immediately, and Kylo frowned for a second, then he seemed to either read his mind or just follow some other kind of clue, because he looked down at Techie.

“Don’t apologize,” he said again. “This kind of reaction is understandable. Come on.”

Techie had to swallow the rest of his apologies. He followed Kylo without another word as he led him through hallways that still looked all the same to Techie. Their steps echoed back at them from the metal walls, but instead of chasing away the silence, the noise just seemed to deepen it.

After they had been walking for a few minutes, Techie finally managed to gather the courage to speak.

"L... Lord Ren?" he asked so lowly that he could hardly feel the air coming over his lips, but Kylo still stopped and turned around with a questioning look in his eyes. Techie swallowed and continued: "Could I... Could I ask you something? Like... two somethings..."

Kylo frowned, and Techie couldn't tell whether it was because he was annoyed with him or something else, but then he nodded. "Ask."

Techie bit the inside of his lip and lowered his eyes to the floor. "How... How did you know where I was?"

A low snort, or a scoff, came in answer. "I heard your steps, and I followed them to take you back to your room. It was rather obvious that you didn't know where you were going."

Techie gave a little nod, then he asked his second question: "Why... Why is there even something like..."

"The rancor down there is one of Lady Kashti's pets," Kylo answered, and Techie flinched a little with the knowledge that he was so slow to speak that Kylo had become too annoyed to wait for him to finish. "As I said, you shouldn't have been able to get into her part of the Temple at all. Somebody will have to find out how this happened, but that should have time until tomorrow."

"But what if anybody else goes in there?" Techie asked, before he remembered that he had only asked for permission to ask two questions. Kylo turned around and started walking again, which, in Techie's mind, was an obvious sign that he had gone too far.

But Kylo still answered him while he was walking. "I will keep watch. It will not happen again tonight."

That made Techie frown, but he didn't dare asking more questions. Didn't Kylo have to sleep? Couldn't he just wake up a servant to stand in front of that door or something like that? Weren't there people up doing some kind of night work? He had seen guards when he had first left the shuttle, even though he had not stumbled over any on his ill-advised stroll earlier. There had to be people guarding the Temple at night though, right?

But all of those questions would remain unanswered for now, because before Techie could even weigh the pros of asking them against the cons of annoying Kylo even more, they had reached the hallway that held his room.

"This is the 'fresher," Kylo said at the first door of the hallway, then he walked farther down, nine doors further down, and halted. "Here is your room."

Techie's heart sank at the realization at how close the 'freshers were to his room. He likely had walked into the wrong direction when he had left his room, because there was no other way to explain how he had gotten it this wrong.

"Thank you so much," Techie whispered, his head lowered. He reached for the opening mechanism of the door, but to his surprise, Kylo's hand caught his wrist. Techie looked up in confusion, and saw a strange, nearly pained expression in Kylo's face.

He wanted to ask what was going on, but the words would not leave his lips. He felt so close to how he had in the Rancor's pit, frozen in place and roiling with emotion, but even though what he felt was close to fear, so close, it was something else entirely.

And then Kylo put a hand on the back of his head and kissed him.

A little choking sound of surprise came from Techie's throat, but then his body went soft and pliant, and he pushed back into the kiss, not even protesting when Kylo let go of his wrist and instead wrapped that other arm around his body to pull him closer.

A tongue pushed its way into Techie's mouth, and Techie whimpered against those broad, demanding lips. Kylo's taste was intoxicating, so sweet and hot and begging to be explored.

But as suddenly as the kiss had started, it ended again. Kylo's lips, hands, and entire body pulled back all at once, and Techie was left with warm, tingling lips and a fuzzy head as he watched the Knight walk down the corridor and vanish from his sight.


	6. Chapter 6

Techie ended up not going to the ‘fresher to wash himself that night. He knew he was stinking, and rubbing himself down with the clean parts of his clothes was hardly any help, but he just really didn’t want to go outside before the lights were on again. He knew that it was unlikely he would lose his way again, but he just couldn’t bear opening that door and walking out. He was finally safe, even if just for a few hours, and he just couldn’t leave this safety behind.

He didn’t get any sleep that night, regardless. Whenever he closed his eyes he was right back in that room, moving towards a mouth full of slavering fangs, crushed by the strength of a claw-studded hand… When his eyes were open, at least he could choose to remember the kiss instead, that strange, unexpected, hot kiss that had his whole body vibrating with need. Now at least he knew that Kylo wanted him; there just was no other explanation for it. He still didn’t understand why he had vanished so quickly, though, as if he had anything to be ashamed about… It wasn’t as if anybody had seen it, after all.

He could not say how long he had lain awake on his bed when the lights went on and a melodious alarm-sound came from a hidden speaker on the ceiling. Since no announcement followed, he guessed that this was not some kind of special alarm but just the way people got woken up around here. A quick look at his comm-link, which he still couldn’t open, but which gave him the time on the lock screen, told him that they were still in the old cycle, half an hour before the new one would start. So he had half an hour to get ready and find his way back to Krel…

He tried to ignore the question as to how he was supposed to ever find his way back there while he put his old, soiled clothes into a laundry chute he had found at the back of his closet, and then put on a new pair of pants and a shirt to go to the ‘fresher. He left the shoes off for now; he likely would have to take them off before he went into the ‘fresher anyway, and to be honest, he just really didn’t like shoes. He definitely could have gotten a pair at MaMa’s complex if he had wanted, but he just really preferred running around barefoot, as long as he only had to be in the server-room at least.

This time, he remembered the way to the ‘fresher, though the string of other black-clad people going in that direction, most of them still in their pajamas, a few in various states of undress, would have been enough indication otherwise. He got a few curious looks from the people around him, and he kept his head low and tried to avoid any kind of eye-contact until he was in the ‘fresher and save in one of the stalls.

He felt a whole lot better when he was cleaned up. He still felt miserable with lack of sleep, but there was nothing to be done about that now, and he had had to function on no sleep for far longer before. Once he had put on his shoes, he grabbed his comm-link and the pill-box and went outside.

It took him quite a bit of courage to hold up one of the people running around in the hallway, but he finally managed to do it and to ask how he got to Lord Kolka’s rooms. That got him a strange look and a question about whether he didn’t know how to use a comm-link, which he had to answer, cheeks burning, with the embarrassing truth, that he had forgotten his identification signature. The black-clad technician (he assumed she was a tech, because she was wearing the goggles) frowned at him, but then gave him a rough description of the way and told him to ask anybody he saw on the way if he got lost again. Then she was off, and he turned into the direction she had described.

He had to only ask for the way once more, which, what with his whole unfamiliarity with this place and especially with the bad luck he’d had yesterday was half a miracle, really. He finally recognized the tail of the huge, creepy space ship on the wall and followed it to the door he had gone through with Krel yesterday.

However, when he was about ten steps away from the door, a tall, black-clad figure came from the other end of the hallway, walking with a purpose that made Techie stop in his tracks. He immediately knew that this person was a Knight– nobody else wore this kind of robes around here, and he had an air of power that made Techie want to stay far away from him – but he had not yet seen this particular Knight. He didn’t think that he was human – except if he had painted his face and put on a very strange hat, maybe. His skin was a dark kind of red, and his eyes were yellow; the same yellow as Krel’s, he thought, and he had some strange kind of combination of white horns and lekku with redish brown stripes. At least Techie thought it were lekku; he wouldn’t actually claim that out loud, not after Krel had told him not to call her head things that. There were also small white circles around his eyes, and another two white blotches coming from his jawbones up to the middle of his cheeks.

He stopped in front of the same door Techie was headed to, and, to his horror, turned and looked right at him. He couldn’t read the look, and it was too short to really signify anything, but Techie still felt icy cold run down his back. The door opened, and the strange Knight vanished behind it.

Techie was feeling nauseous again. He knew that he was expected in that room, and that if he didn’t come on time, he’d be in a lot of trouble. But knowing that there would be another Knight in there, one of those he had not yet met, made him nervous as hell. Krel had been alright, and Kylo, was, well… He quickly shoved that thought away, in case they would be poking around his head again. But the first time he had met Kolka had gone pretty horribly for him, and who could tell if this new Knight wasn’t as sadistic as Kolka, or even more so? Or what if he didn’t like the thought of having a lowly technician eating with them? Techie had wondered about that yesterday already; though of course, Kolka could not have had fun with him if he hadn’t been right there next to him. But this new Knight… He just didn’t know what to expect, and since he knew that pretty much everything was possible in this place, the thought of going inside that room made his hands sweat.

But then a new alarm-signal came, again not followed by any announcement, and a quick look at his comm-link told him that the new cycle had now begun. He had to go inside. So he swallowed his nervous nausea as well as he could and walked towards the door, then pushed the buzzer. The door opened just a moment later.

The strange Knight had already taken a seat at the table, on one of the two chairs. Kolka was sitting on the half-round bench opposite him, with Krel also on the bench between the two men.

Krel had just said something to the strange Knight, but when he entered, she immediately stopped speaking and turned to look at him. A genuine smile appeared on her lips, and she waved him towards the table.

"There you are, baby fry! Come over here, sit own. Kolka, get up and let the boy in."

Kolka cast him a look that didn't hold all of the vicious amusement it had held yesterday, but still a good part of it, and stood up from the bench to make space for Techie. He didn't step away very far though, so that Techie had to squeeze past him, which he immediately used to run a 'helpful' hand over his hip and rear again.

Techie sat down close to Krel, not looking at the strange Knight and trying to give Kolka all the space he could get so he would maybe not sit down close enough to him to keep touching him. Of course, he had no such luck; Kolka sat down close enough to him again to push his thigh against his, and one of his hands squeezed his knee for a second before he went back to eating the bowl full of some kind of white mash in front of him.

Krel greeted him with a gentle pat on his hand, which made Techie blush a little. He always felt so much like an animal around Krel... Though he still felt a lot more comfortable with her touches than with Kolka's.

There was one unclaimed bowl on the table, and Krel moved it and a spoon with a tiny motion of her fingers to the front of Techie. He still wasn't used to this kind of thing, but he tried to keep his surprise hidden. He tried a spoon full of the food. It was really, really good - milky and sweet, like nothing he had ever eaten before.

"I heard you went for a bit of a stroll yesterday night," she said just when Techie put the second spoon full into his mouth. He swallowed heavily, and felt a sharp blush rise into his cheeks.

"Y-yes, my lady..." he said lowly, his eyes fixed on his bowl while he knew that all three of the Knights were looking at him. "I... I couldn't use my comm-link because..." He had to say it, because he had to actually ask her for his code, but he still felt extremely ashamed about it, so he had to take another breath of air before he said: "I forgot my identification code..."

There was silence for just a moment, then he heard a snort coming from Krel. "You'd think somebody who is so good with security systems would be better at keeping numbers in his head."

There was a bit of derision in her words, but no real malice, and a hand in his hair immediately took out the bite of the comment. Her fingers, as gentle and clever as he remembered them from yesterday, ran through his hair and then down his temple to rub over his cheekbones.

"You're so pretty when you blush, my little guppy..." she said with something that sounded like a purr in her voice, and he could feel Kolka press his thigh harder against his. An ice cold shiver ran down Techie's back when Krel's fingers ran down over his jaw and dipped into the collar of his shirt. "Maybe I should let you work for that code," she whispered into his ear. "Kolka really likes you, you know, and he's been asking me whether I couldn't lend you to him..."

The icy shiver turned into a wave of panic. He looked up at Krel, mouth opening and closing, caught between wanting desperately to beg her not to do that and being deathly afraid that begging might make her angry, or more determined to actually do it.

But then there was the noise of somebody clearing his throat, and Krel turned her head towards the third Knight, then she made a face that looked nearly disappointed.

"Alright. Yes," she said, as if to an unspoken command, and sighed. "I should be getting ready for my little intermezzo with Kull anyway." She didn't bother scooting out of the other side of the bench, but just pulled her legs closer and then jumped up on the bench and off it. She nodded towards the two of them, then again to the other Knight, though the movement of her head seemed a little more like a tiny bow than a nod.

Techie looked at the strange Knight in utter confusion. Why was Krel listening to him - listening to such an extend that he didn't even have to say anything, apparently? And why had this man saved him? What was it to him if Krel allowed Kolka to bent him over the table and fuck him like he very obviously wanted?

Yellow eyes in a dark red face looked at him for only a few moments, but it felt like an entire lifetime. He felt as if his innermost being was pulled outside for this man's consumption, as if he saw every fear, every dirty thought, every shame that had ever taken up residence in Techie's mind.

The silence that followed Krel's departure didn't just seem to weigh on Techie. He could feel Kolka moving away from him, and when he looked at him he saw that he had also stood up.

"I need to have a word with Kedesh," he said by way of explanation to the remaining Knight. "Will you take Krel's little pet to the arena later?"

Techie felt a sharp pang of shame at the way those words - 'Krel's little pet' - sounded coming from Kolka. Of course, he knew that that was what he was, but... It still stung to know that it was true, that Krel had such absolute power over him, especially now that he knew she at least considered giving that power to Kolka. He knew that he was being hypocritical, that if he had enjoyed the thought of Kylo fucking him, he shouldn't be such a prude to even think about refusing to spread his legs for anybody his mistress wanted to give him to, but still... It wasn't even the thought about having sex with Kolka that turned him off it. It was that perpetually amused, cruel glint in the Knight's eyes whenever he looked at him.

But then Kolka left the room, and now he was alone with a person who he couldn't read, even though he seemed to be able to read Techie so very well. He snuck a shy glance at the Knight, who had taken up his own spoon and was slowly eating his mash. They sat like this in silence, Techie feeling too nervous to eat anything while the only noise came from the Knight's spoon scraping through the bowl, his lips closing, his throat swallowing.

Finally, he put the spoon down and looked at Techie again. Techie forced himself to look at him too for a second, but the look in those yellow eyes was too much, and he had to look down at the table again.

"You can call me Lord Kanar," the Knight suddenly said, and Techie looked up after all, startled. When the Knight didn't say anything more, Techie swallowed and nodded quickly. But the silence was heavy - too heavy even for him. So he gathered his courage like he had to do so many times in the last few days, and opened his mouth.

"Tha... Thank you for... for..." His voice broke, and he looked down at the table again. What was he supposed to say? 'Thank you for telling Krel off' was far, far too dismissive of his mistress, and even if he knew he wouldn't get in trouble for saying it, he just couldn't bring himself to talk about her like that. 'Thank you for saving me'? No, that was assuming that this had actually been the man's goal. He couldn't know that. But he had to say something - he couldn't be impolite to somebody even his mistress listened to.

"I mean..." he swallowed, then tried again. "I mean, thank you..." Maybe that would be enough.

"I just kept her from doing something she might regret," the Knight said. "I don't believe she understands what it would do to you if she started whoring you out. And I'd rather she didn't find that out by trial and error."

Now Techie looked at him, amazed that he was suddenly saying so much, and amazed that he thought it right to tell him such things about the woman who owned him.

Those yellow eyes were on him again, searching every inch of his soul. "She has never had a ... 'pet' before," he said. "She likes you, quite a lot. But she doesn't understand how fundamentally pain can warp a simple mind. And she doesn't quite understand how much pain Lord Kolka would inflict on you, given half a chance."

His eyes unfocused for a second, before he turned and looked at the door out of the room. "I don't think she would be having this duel if she really understood what this kind of pain does to somebody."

To be perfectly honest, Techie didn't feel like Lord Kanar was speaking to him. This seemed to be one of those situations where somebody higher up just talked to somebody who was there, preferably somebody with a lot less power than them, just to get thoughts out of his head. He had been in this kind of situation before, and he knew that the best you could do was just to sit still and listen, and maybe find some useful information to hang on to.

"Not a single one of the people in this Temple had a simple life, but there are so many different kinds of hardship," Kanar muttered before he took a sip from a cup next to his bowl. "It is no wonder Kull dislikes you so much... And with Krel insisting on treating you like some kind of small furry creature, I guess I understand her feelings of resentment..."

He put the cup down and rose, slowly, like black smoke coming from a chimney. He looked at Techie again, who was feeling lost and confused by his monologue, which seemed to hold so much knowledge that would be essential for him to know, if he could just decipher it.  
"Come on now. The duel will start soon." And Techie stood up to follow this strange man who had defended him for reasons he still did not quite understand, and wondered what he had meant with 'It is no wonder Kull dislikes you so much'...

~*~

The "arena" was a cave larger than any of those Techie had seen before in the Temple - and actually a lot larger than any room he had ever seen in his life. He followed Lord Kanar through a door at the very top of the cave, where benches had been hewn into the stone, one below the other, with a single walkway down to a steep fall. There was no wall or anything else separating this viewing platform from the depths of the cave, which lay far below them - if ten men stood on each other's shoulders, they would have been able to reach the platform from down there, Techie guessed. There were no other platforms anywhere around the diameter of the cave, just two large openings in the stone at the bottom, leading out into a wide area that seemed to have a number of different floorings. One large square was sand, Techie thought, another definitely some kind of metal, one stone, but he couldn't make out what the others were.

Kanar had stopped in front of the backmost bench.

"It's proper for those who are not Knights to sit in the back," he said, and Techie nodded and scooted into the row. Kanar sat down in front of him, slightly to his side so that his large horns - if those were horns - didn't inhibit his view of the arena below.

They were the first there, but soon Kolka entered the platform. His eyes immediately found Techie and cast him a grin, but Techie didn't even have enough time to feel uncomfortable about this again, because another Knight entered behind Kolka, a Knight he had not seen maskless before, and whose appearance immediately made him shrink farther away from the door.

He was tall, though not quite as tall as Kylo, and broad, with piercing yellow eyes like all the Knights had, except for Kull and Kolka and Kylo. He was bald, and did not seem to have eyebrows either, which put him into stark contrast with Kolka, but what really made Techie flinch were the huge, bulging, knotted scars that covered the lower half of his face and went down his neck into the collar of his robes. He looked as if part of his face and throat had been ripped away by some kind of horrible beast; though the scars were too straight to have been inflected by bite wounds.

Techie suddenly remembered the first time he had come into Sizzly's workshop. How Krel had teased her about one of the Knight's vocoders - he really couldn't remember the name anymore, though he was rather sure it was something with K, which seemed to be the letter all of their names started with. Sizzly had told him that this particular Knight was mute, and looking at this man, he could not imagine that he would have an easy time speaking, what with those huge scars taking in most of his throat.

They sat down on the other side of the walkway, and Techie was glad that they were sitting in such an angle to him that he couldn't see those scars anymore.

Another person entered, and again it was somebody he had never seen before. It was an older woman, white-haired and white-skinned, a color that made it clear that she wasn't human, even if he had not seen the half dozen of scarlet red horns that grew out of her head, or her black lips, which made her look even paler. Her eyes were yellow, but with a ring of red around them, and those eyes found Techie after she had taken a look around the platform. She narrowed her eyes at him in displeasure, and Techie, caught between confusion and fear, flinched when he heard Kanar's low voice.

"That is Lady Kashti. It was her wing you stumbled into last night. Look at her necklace."

Techie did look at her necklace, and saw a band filled with dozens upon dozens of teeth, with one in the front that made him shiver with the memory of last night. Teeth like that one had nearly eaten him alive...

"She keeps one tooth of each of her pets after they die," he said, still low, voice rumbling in a way that made Techie sure that nobody but him could hear. "And she was not very pleased that you stumbled into her price rancor's pit yesterday. Apparently it is not unlikely that he will now refuse dead food because of the excitement."

Techie swallowed and looked away from Lady Kashti, back at Kanar. "Does... Does everybody know what happened?"

"Of course. What happened was unusual and has implications for the safety of our own quarters, and the safety of other personnel of the Temple. And regardless of that, we keep very few to ourselves among the Knights of Ren. You must have noticed by now that we are rather wont to read each other's minds."

That revelation immediately flushed Techie with embarrassment and dread. Did they know about everything that had happened last night? Did they know about the kiss? No, Kylo had looked so dismayed at that, had run away so fast, he wouldn't let his fellow Knights know about that, right? There had to be a way for them to not share their thoughts - there just had to. He couldn't bear to think that everybody knew that he had given into that kiss so easily, how eager he had been... Could that be the reason why Krel had thought it would be a good idea to lend him to Kolka? Because of how obviously needy he was?

Another man came through the door, grey-haired and a lot older looking than the white-haired woman. He also had yellow eyes.

Then, last of all, Kylo entered the platform, and the door closed behind him.

Techie cast him a nervous look, but he wouldn’t return it. He sat down in front of Kanar, close to the walkway, and then raised his hand.

At this signal, something happened down at the bottom of the cave. A black-clad figure stepped out of each of the openings and walked towards the sand square in the middle. He could make out their masks just so, so he knew that the one on the left had to be Krel, the one on the right Kull. They both wore weapons on their back, which they drew when they stepped onto the sand. Krel's weapon was the huge sword he had seen her with before, a gigantic weapon longer than she was tall, made of some kind of black metal he had never seen before. Kull's weapon, a double-bladed sword, looked puny in comparison, though it had something Krel's weapon did not have - the blue currents of a vibroblade zapping along each side of the blades. He had seen vibroblades before, though they were largely considered impractical and old-fashioned in a place where energy blasters could easily make them short-circuit. He wondered why somebody like Kull would use such an antiquated weapon, but he didn't have a lot of time to wonder, because both of them looked up to them now, apparently awaiting another sign, because he could see by the back of Kylo's head that he nodded at them once.

Both of them went into their initial stances, and then the fight started, out of the blue, without any kind of further signal.

Kull lunged first, and while this did not surprise Techie, it very much surprised him that she did not actually come down from her lunge right away. Instead she was hanging in the air for several moments, turning her body upside down while spinning her double blades, before she came down, shooting at Krel with breakneck speed. Krel had stood still for the first few moments, but now raised her sword to block the attack. But instead of meeting her sword right on with her own, Kull spun again, so fast that Techie's eyes started to whir nervously as they tried to follow, and used Krel's blade as a jump off, but instead of jumping up and landing behind her, she turned in the air, her head facing downward, one of her double blades aimed for the back of her legs –

But Krel's giant sword came whirling backwards and caught the lower one of Kull's blades, then Krel ducked under the upper one which was now swinging for her head and Kull turned to put her feet under her, and, within the same ducking motion, kicked against the middle part of the double blade, right against Kull's knuckles. Kull did not drop the sword, but it bought Krel enough time to jump backwards and out of the reach of the long vibroblades.

Krel was hardly out of reach, though, as Kull charged again. This time she didn't lunch, but attacked Krel head-on, which made Krel pull up her sword to block the upper blade, but the lower one used the propelling power of the parry to pull through, going for Krel's legs again. But with the same motion, the upper blade pulled back and gave Krel a chance to pack the intensity of her block into an attack, targeting Kull's shoulder. Kull had to stop her own attack to block the sword, and then the battle turned into a lightning fast exchange of attacks and blocks, parries and ripostes. The more intense the fight became, the larger the area it covered. Both women moved with such a speed over the sand square, spinning and jumping and lunging, that Techie got confused over who was who a few times during the fastest parts of the fight. None of them was able to land a hit, though he started to notice that Kull was going for Krel's arms and legs, while Krel's hits mainly aimed at Kull's head and shoulders. In general, Kull moved a lot more than Krel, a lot faster and a lot farther. She kept using spin attacks like the one she had started the fight with, while Krel's use of her sword was more economic, parrying most of the time and only pushing back in those few moments when she had Kull at a disadvantage after an especially good block. Twice she repeated her attack after Kull had given a bad parry, which had caused Kull to roll out of her reach once, at which point Techie was sure Krel would have been able to get a proper strike in; but she didn't, she just returned to her stance and waited for Kull's next attack.

After an intense few minutes, both women were standing apart again. Kull was breathing so heavily that Techie could make it out from up on the platform; she was slouching slightly, and he could swear that her stance didn't look as deliberate as it had earlier. Krel, on the other hand, looked relaxed, as if she was not a hair more exhausted than when the fight had started.

Sudden realization dawned on Techie. Krel was playing with Kull. The reason why Krel had looked so much slower than her, the reason why she had hardly ever attacked, why she hadn't used the obvious opening during Kull's evacuation roll - Krel didn't want to defeat Kull fast. She wanted to teach her a lesson, just like she had said earlier. Kull had put everything she had into this fight, but Krel likely still didn't even breathe any harder than she had before.

Suddenly something changed. Krel seemed to have enough of just defending, because her stance shifted, and then she charged at Kull, the first time she had taken the initiative in this fight. Kull tried to block the attack while turning her body to get out of the way like she had done with previous attacks, but the sheer force of the hit surprised her, and in this split-second Krel let go of her own sword with one hand, grabbed the other blade – just grabbed it, despite the vibro currents going through it – and pulled it right out of her hand. Techie had never seen a swordfight before, but when he had imagined those, he definitely wouldn’t have thought that something like this was even possible.

Krel tossed the double blade aside. Kull immediately, instinctively, reached out towards it, and to Techie’s surprise it actually started moving towards her, but not fast enough for Kull to be able to block the hard hit that Krel gave her shoulder with the handle of her sword. Her arm fell, and so did the flying double blade, and Krel came into that opening with a kick against Kull’s chest that made her stumble back far enough that Krel could swing her sword again, low this time, and take Kull’s feet out from under her.

Kull’s back hit the sand, and as she tried to get up immediately, Krel held out one hand towards her, which stopped her, for whatever reason – likely because she was pushing her down with her Force powers, Techie thought. Then Krel walked forward to her and put one boot on the center of her chest, holding her down while her hand made a movement towards her head. Her helmet flew of, and then Krel held her hand in the direction of the double blades and called them to her. They flew into her outstretched hand, and she turned one of the blades towards Kull’s face. Techie couldn’t see what exactly happened, but just a moment later Krel dropped the double blade again and stepped off Kull, who sat up, but made no attempt to stand.

“Lady Krel Ren wins,” Kylo called and stood up. Techie saw Krel bow slightly at the bottom of the cave, then she put her sword back into the sheath she was wearing on her back and headed towards the exit she had entered through.

Kylo turned around, turning his back to the open cave where Kull was still sitting on the sand, deflated and defeated. He looked around for a second, as if trying to make sure he had everybody's attention, then he spoke, without raising his voice significantly, with the kind of conviction that he would be heard that only those who knew how to make people listen had.

"Since this is settled, I will leave for the Finalizer today. Komo," he said, looking at the old man who was sitting next to Lady Kashti, "I want to brief you and Kull on the mission I told you about before I go. I'll expect the two of you to leave today as well. You will take the shuttle with me, and the briefing will take place there."

The old man nodded, then he stood up and, with a small bow of his head towards Kylo, he left the platform. Lord Kanar stood up next, and motioned for Techie to follow him out of the benches and out of the cave. But just when Kanar was walking through the doorway, Techie patiently waiting at the very edge of the benches to follow him once he was through, Kylo approached him with two long strides.

Immediately heat flushed Techie's cheeks as he looked up at those beautiful dark eyes that looked at him with a mix of skepticism and thoughtfulness. He couldn't keep himself from taking in the Master of the Knights' face, his strong nose, his asymmetrical, intense jaw, his big, soft mouth...

Suddenly there was a hand on Techie's chin, and Kylo tipped it up, as if he wanted to have a closer look at his face. Techie was caught in his eyes, frozen not with fear this time but with something different, something irresistible which he would not have minded exploring further, beyond the dizzying memories of last night's kiss. But there would be no exploration at this point in time, because Kylo let go of his chin again and walked past him as if nothing had happened.

Kanar, who was still standing in the door, made way to let Kylo through, and at that moment Techie realized something he should have noticed a lot earlier, and definitely would have, if he had not been so preoccupied by trying to keep his heart from bursting through his chest while he looked into those eyes.

Everybody who was still here had been watching them.

Lord Kanar, Lady Kashti, Kolka and the Knight next to him whose name he had forgotten; all of them had seen their Master take his chin in hand and looking at him like that, and all of them had likely seen his burning cheeks, and if they had taken a look into his thoughts, all of them had seen...

Now his heart really wanted to jump out of his chest, but for completely different reasons. He wished the ground would open and swallow him whole. The heat that had run through his body at the intensity of Kylo's gaze was replaced by ice water, and he suddenly felt as if his lungs were closed, as if he couldn't get his breath to go where it was supposed to. He turned around, away from the knowing faces, and rushed out of the door, past Lord Kanar, but not much farther, as he pressed himself against the wall right next to the door and tried to forcefully pull air into his body.

Kanar was watching him, with those inscrutable yellow eyes, before he stepped close towards him and muttered, "Relax," into his ear. Suddenly a now nearly familiar softness came over Techie, a sweet languidness, a feeling of perfect contentment, and he realized that Lord Kanar had used his powers on him. He slipped down along the wall, his legs sprawling in front of him as he sat there on the floor, his breathing becoming more and more regular.

From the corner of his eyes he could see Lady Kashti come out of the cave and head in the opposite direction from where he was sitting, and then Kolka and the big Knight he didn't know came out, splitting up, with Kolka staying by the door and the other Knight following Lady Kashti.

The fact that Kolka was still here made fresh nervousness cut through the magic calm Techie was feeling, but then he saw Krel come towards them out of the direction Kashti and the other Knight had taken, still in her fighting clothes, her helmet under her arm and a big grin on her face that made her pointy teeth shine.

"Well, that should have given her something to chew on for a while," she said, before she seemed to take in the scene before her - Techie sitting on the floor, Kanar standing next to him, Kolka at a respectable distance from both of them. "Did anything happen?" she asked, and then she looked at Kolka for a moment. Techie was still not sure how to tell that they were talking with each other in their heads, but when Krel's eyes widened for a moment and she nodded slightly, he knew that Kolka had told her something that surprised her.

She looked at Techie for a second as if she had never seen him, but then her grin returned.

"Did you enjoy the fight, guppy?" she asked, a little too casually.

Techie nodded slowly, then stood up again. "I... It was..." He swallowed, thinking back to the whirlwind of blades he had witnessed, "incredible," he finally concluded.

That made Krel's grin broaden. "Has to be pretty impressive when you're not used to see people with force powers fight. Kull's fighting might be flashy and uneconomic as all hell, but I guess it is rather fun to watch."

She winked towards Kolka, as if they were sharing a private joke. "Though watching's definitely not as much fun as taking that hopping bunny apart."

"Somebody should get the boy to the workshops," Kanar interrupted. "The excitement is over, and we all should get back to work."

Krel nodded and pushed her helmet into Kolka's arms. "Take care of that for me, will you? I still have to give him his ID code anyway, I can just do that while I take him to Sizzly."

Kolka agreed, though his voice was a lot lower than Techie had ever heard it before, nearly subdued. He kept wondering about that while he followed Krel through the hallways, back into the part of the Temple reserved for the work of the technicians. As soon as they reached the door to Sizzly's workshop slash security center, Krel pulled up her own comm-link to look up Techie's ID, and then had him put it in while she watched so she could make sure that he got it. 

"I'll be busy tonight, so you'll have to eat in the mess hall," she told him before she opened the door to the workshop. "Don't let Sizzly tease you too much."

Techie nodded and muttered his good-byes, then took a step into the door, about to greet Sizzly, when he suddenly felt a gloved hand on his shoulder, holding him back. He turned around and looked at Krel, who had turned to him again and was now looking at his face intently, before she quickly shook her head, as if to herself, and then let go of him and walked away down the corridor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hit me up over on my tumblr :) 
> 
> Also, guess who is finally going to show up in the next chapter~


	7. Chapter 7

The change of coming to the Finalizer after so much time in the Temple of Ren chafed at Kylo like a pair of ill-fitting boots. Surrounded by strangers instead of comrades, feared instead of understood, his nerves had always been on edge in the first few hours of adjustment. He had to remind himself to actually speak to people, to lay out plans with words instead of just thinking them and knowing that his will would be carried out. His Knights were extensions of himself, the arbiters of his intention, and without them he felt as if somebody had cut off his arms and legs.

Where the Temple felt like a living body, breathing the hot power of the Force, the Finalizer was a machine through and through. Everything on this ship seemed cold, methodical, clicking into their assigned places without ever understanding the bigger picture. The thought alone that not a single being on board of this ship knew the intoxicating feeling of making the Force yours, this one ecstasy Kylo had hunted his whole life, made him miss the endless corridors and winding bowels of the Temple.

But the First Order’s goals were the Knights’ goals, and if he wanted to see the day when the galaxy would be back to its imperial glory, under the leadership of Snoke, he would have to stop being a homesick little bitch and actually get things done.

The main briefing room was just off the bridge, so that Hux would not have to stay away from the center of his command for too long. The General was already there when Kylo entered, flipping through documents on his data pad. As always, every second that he couldn’t spend working was a lost opportunity. He would never know the insights mediation had given Kylo, the power of even a moment’s complete, motionless silence. But even though Hux would never hold this kind of power, just looking at him reminded Kylo again of the power the General had over him. And when those ocean green eyes looked up at the noise of his helmet’s closing mechanism clicking open and met his own eyes, he felt as if all the countless hours of meditation he had spent in his life had done nothing to prepare him for the gut-wrenching need that Hux created in him. If he was a true descendent of the Sith, if he was true to their teachings, he would be able to take this need and turn it into strength; but looking at General Hux’s face, the beautiful lines of his jaw and nose, the intensity of his eyes, he felt weak to the bottom of his heart. Even though every line and plane of his face was so identical to the pathetic, pity inspiring boy he had started to want, their tension, their set, was so different that for just a moment, he wondered how he could ever have seen Hux in Techie. Where Techie seemed to bruise from as much as a harsh look, Hux seemed to be able to withstand an explosion with the sheer force of his cool, single-minded will.

“Finally,” Hux said as he laid out the holo projector and started it, making the plans of the home of some important person he had to apprehend appear above the table. He started to lay out the mission objective and everything important that Kylo should know, but Kylo just couldn’t bring himself to really listen. His eyes were glued to Hux’ lips, but for quite a different reason than to not miss out on anything he was saying. His mind had wandered back to the last night, to the softness of Techie’s lips, the sweet, but slightly bitter taste of his mouth, to the way he had strained into his touch, so shy but also so eager…

He wondered if Hux would taste like Techie, if his tongue would be able to find their similarities as easily as his eyes. His body would be different, he knew that. He remembered the frail softness that had been evident in every part of Techie’s naked body on the medic’s examination table; he had never been starved, but the bad quality of the food he had eaten had turned his skin dry and discolored, had bloated his belly and rounded his thighs, had left his face puffy. Kylo had wanted to touch him to feel just how soft he was, to grab those hips and feel the give between his skin and his bone. And the sight of his ass…

Hux would be different, definitely. He had been brought up on nutrition bars and exactly measured rations, on drills and discipline, and even in his uniform it was obvious that every part of his body was trained to the exact degree Hux needed for it to function perfectly. There would be not a spare inch of skin, not a pound of fat to dig his fingers in; he would be all wiry muscles and sharp bones, as painful as delicious, so hard to break but so wonderful to own…

Suddenly a hand slapped the table top right in front of him. Kylo guessed that a part of him had noticed Hux coming closer, but since a far more active part of him had been completely consumed by the thought of his body, he had not judged this factoid important. But now he was standing right in front of him, looking down at him as if at a naughty student who he had noticed day-dreaming during class. His nostrils were flaring, and his lips became even thinner in his displeasure.

“When I am talking, I generally expect people to listen to me, Ren,” he hissed. “Especially when I am talking about a mission crucial for the success of the First Order.” 

That voice… He was sure that Techie’s and Hux’ voice were just as similar as their noses and ears and chins, but at the same time few things seemed to put them so far apart. He could never imagine Techie speaking to him – or to anybody else – in such a tone, with a cold anger that showed just how much he felt entitled to everybody’s attention, everybody’s obedience. If it had been Techie he’d be ignoring, he’d just shrink back into the background, sure that he had done something wrong, waiting patiently to be acknowledged or punished or treated however Kylo saw fit. But Hux – Hux would pounce on any slight just to rub his General’s stripes into Kylo’s face.

He could see the anger growing in those green eyes glowering down at him, but there was something else, something that pushed its way through the anger and changed the lines of his face into something vicious, wicked.

“Have you completely lost your mind now?” he asked, his voice dangerously low.

Kylo leaned back in his chair, looked up at Hux with what he hoped was a challenge in his eyes. “General, can you really not fathom the concept of somebody listening unless you get enthusiastic applause for every word?”

Hux raised his eyebrows at that, but let out a little noise that sounded nearly like a laugh. “You think you’re so clever, Ren…” he said, and then he was coming closer, bending down above him, looking into his eyes with a brazenness Kylo would have beaten out of anybody else. “Do you even realize how easy it is to read your face?”

And then there was a hand in Kylo’s hair, pulling down sharply, forcing his head back as Hux’ mouth descended upon his and crushed his lips in a brutal kiss. A surprised noise escaped Kylo, and the General used the opening of his mouth to push his tongue in, let it sweep over Kylo’s before he bit down hard on his lower lip.

When Hux drew back, still keeping his hold of Kylo’s hair, a vibrant, red smear of blood was visible on his pale lips. The General impaled Kylo with his gaze, then slowly drew his tongue over the blood. 

“I am absolutely sick of all your pussy-footing, Ren,” he said in a low, growling voice, then he gave Kylo’s hair another sharp tug. He could feel how the General’s strong fingers weaved through his hair, winding it around his hand. Kylo grit his teeth, but didn’t fight, just stared up into those water green eyes. “I thought you would have made your attentions clear months ago, really, but obviously you are either a lot more indecisive or cowardly than I would have thought.” He bent down again, and Kylo thought he would kiss him once more, but then he just stayed an inch away from his lips, their noses just shy of touching. “If you had even one courageous bone in your body, if there was more to you than just your freakish powers, you would have pushed me against a wall months ago, Ren. I know how much you wanted to do that…”

Kylo’s head was spinning. He was so close to Hux that the smell of his skin, of his regulation shampoo, of his shaving soap, was clouding his mind, and those words were pushing their way into him, filling an empty space in him he had not even known existed. He knew he was insulting him, but it was different than their usual spats. Every single one of his acidic words was laced with a poison of unfamiliar sweetness, and he wanted to kiss his mouth so badly again…

But just when Hux started to move closer again, the General’s comm-link beeped, and he stood up again, let go of Kylo’s hair and left him alone with the sharp sting in his scalp and even more painful hunger in his soul.

“The mission schedule has changed,” Hux said after he had checked the message. “You will have to go right away – apparently our target has gotten intel of our plans. Your transport leaves in T minus five.”

Still dazed, Kylo nodded and stood. But just when he was about to turn around, Hux’ hand caught his shoulder. Kylo looked back, and felt himself burn up in the General’s gaze. “We will continue this later,” he said. Then he turned around and let Kylo leave the meeting room.

~*~

Techie was going through his very first in-depth check of the security system when another technician came into the room.

“Hey Sizzly,” the tech, a dark-haired girl with her goggles shoved up on her forehead, greeted the head-technician, then she nodded towards Techie. “Is that the newbie?”

Sizzly, who was half-hidden inside another droid she was repairing, just gave a low grunting sound and something that might have been interpreted as a nod as reply. Techie had come to like her in the two days he had been working with her, but he had very early on figured out that if she was immersed in a task, nothing short of an explosion could get her out of it.

Which was likely why she had given up the job of security-center tech so freely. You had to be pretty on your feet for that kind of work. Of course, you also had to be able to just sit around for hours without anything happening, which also didn’t seem to be Sizzly’s kind of thing.

The tech smiled at him and came up to his chair. Techie made to stand up, but she just waved her hand at him to stay seated. “Hi! I need your comm-link real quick.”

Her jovial, friendly tone took Techie a little aback. He wasn’t the best at meeting new people, and this girl’s way of talking gave him the feeling as if he had already met her, but didn’t remember. And he couldn’t say that he liked that a lot.

“Why?” he asked, a little bit more suspicious sounding than he had wanted it to come out.

“I’m looking into your little Rancor adventure,” she said, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Techie could feel himself bristle – he still didn’t really want to think about last night (had it really only been last night?), and honestly, he didn’t like the thought that people he had never seen before knew stuff like that about him.

“And I’ve already checked the door to Lady Kashti’s quarters,” she continued, “and since nothing’s wrong there, I figured it’s more likely than not that something is wrong with your comm-link. So, can I have it?” If she had noticed the defensive tone in his voice, she didn’t let anything on.

“Alright,” he finally said and took it out of the breast-pocket of his black uniform jacket. The girl took it and then opened a little satchel she was wearing on her belt, from which she pulled a connection cord; then she unclipped a datapad from the other side of her belt and put it down on an empty surface next to the security console, plugging the cord into both the comm-link and the datapad.

From his chair, Techie couldn’t see what she was doing on her datapad, but it only took her half a minute or so to let out a relieved sigh.

“Okay,” she said, “I know what happened. Whoever calibrated this link put Lady Krel’s name into the wrong tag. She should be in the ‘issued by’ and the ‘authority’ tags, not the ‘proprietor’ tag. That’s why the door thought you were Lady Krel, and Lady Krel has access to Lady Kashti’s place.”

She made some inputs, then she unplugged the cord and gave the link back to Techie with a broad smile. “So. You can still enter Lady Krel’s and Lord Kanar’s places, but this should keep you from accidentally messing up the diet plans of any more of Lady Kashti’s pets.”

She gave him a wink at that, which actually made a smile rise on Techie’s face. And honestly, that was a feat – he couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled. It felt pretty strange.

“Oh, by the way,” she said as she stuffed the cord back into her satchel. “I’m Eff. I mean, actually I’m Effeffiffa, but nobody’s called me that since my father. It’s a generational thing, you know? My grand-grandfather was Eff, my grandfather Effeff, my mother Effeffi, so now I’m Effeffiffa.” She grinned again, and Techie smiled back. “Nice to meet you, newbie. What’s your name?”

Suddenly his smile faltered, and he looked at the security console again. In this environment – with two other technicians in the same room – he felt just how stupid his ‘name’ actually was.

He just really wished he had a real name.

“I…” he started, then cleared his throat, “I don’t really have…” He bit his lip and glanced at Eff, who was starting to frown slightly. “People used to call me ‘Techie’, so I guess that’s my name… kinda…”

Eff’s frown deepened for a moment, but then her eyes widened and her mouth formed a silent little ‘O’. But just a moment later she seemed to shake off whatever feeling she was showing on her face and smiled again. “Are you like, super married to that name? Because I mainly need people’s names to yell at them through hallways, and since you’re also in security, I’m likely going to have to yell at you quite a bit, and if I just yell ‘Techie’ around here I’m pretty sure everybody would think I’m talking to them.”

Techie, taken aback, just stared at her.

“I mean, like, if I gave you a nickname? Would that be okay?” she asked again, a little bit more subdued this time, though the smile was still on her lips.

He couldn’t help but feel suspicious again.

“Like what?”

“Like…” She paused and looked at him intently, obviously thinking. “Red, maybe? I mean, I’m pretty sure you’re the only red-haired tech around here, so there’d be no potential for confusion.”

Techie stayed silent for a moment, thinking. ‘Red’ wasn’t so bad, was it? It was descriptive, but not pejorative. He could live with that.

“Alright,” he said, and tried on another smile for her.

“Great!” Eff said with a grin, then she took her datapad. “I’ll see you in the mass hall tonight?”

“Uhm… Sure?” Krel had told him to eat there tonight anyway, and the thought that he might actually already know somebody in what would likely be a sea of unfamiliar faces gave him a slightly fuzzy feeling.

“Wonderful. See you tonight!” And with that, Eff left the room.

Techie still felt the unfamiliar pull of smiling in his cheeks as he turned back to his security screenes.


	8. Chapter 8

Just like his bedroom, the mass hall of the Temple was cleaner, more spacious and better equipped than any Techie had seen before. At the first place where he’d lived, all the servants had just eaten in the kitchen, and in the Clan complex, you’d generally get your rations from commission and either ate in your quarter or at your station. In the Temple mass, though, droids put together trays of food behind a glass wall and gave it to individuals through a hatch, and the people working in the Temple sat around a dozen or more black tables while they ate. Techie got in line for a tray, and surprisingly found that the food they were given was actual fresh food, not unlike what he had eaten in Kolka’s quarters – a kind of beige grain with red sauce on it, little cubes of colorful vegetables, two small, white balls that might have been eggs, and even square pieces of meat, accompanied by a cup of blue milk, the only food on his tray he could actually identify.

When he turned around and walked towards the tables, insecure about where he should sit down, he suddenly heard Eff calling out: “Red! Over here!” He turned to see her sitting at a table a little bit off, with a group of three other technicians and two servants, as far as he could tell from the goggles that had been shoved up their foreheads and the masks that were bunched around necks like neckerchiefs. He sat down next to Eff and lifted a hand in a shy greeting towards the other people around.

Eff quickly introduced everybody to him – most of the techs worked in different parts of security, though one was with weapons development. Then a whole barrage of questions came from two of the other techs; whether it was true that he had been in Lady Kashti’s Rancor pit, how he liked working here, if he was getting along with Sizzly, what kind of security systems he had worked with before. As he tried to answer all those questions as well as he could – he had never been a good speaker, and he kept stumbling over his words and stuttering – he noticed that questions about his personal life were strangely absent from the conversation. He was glad about that, of course, but it was a little strange. 

Since Krel didn’t call for him the next day either, he had lunch and dinner with the same group of people again, and at the end of dinner he finally managed to ask the question that had been running through his mind since when the Knights had taken him with them.

“Does…” He had to clear his throat, then repeat himself so he didn’t start stuttering again, “does anybody of you have some idea why Lady Kull got so angry at Lady Krel when she brought me here?” They knew about the duel, he had caught that much from some of their conversations. Even though he felt strange talking about this with anybody – since he still felt he was the reason for this whole fight – he thought that if anybody knew anything and would actually give him a straight answer, it would be these people, who were in a far more similar position to his own than Krel or Kanar who both seemed to know what was going on but didn’t seem to want to share it with him.

“Well,” Eff started, then looked along the table. “I mean, it’s a bit strange, to be honest. It’s not like they never bring people back for specific tasks, even if they’ve not been in the Order before. Jo over there used to work in a zoo before Lady Kashti brought him here to help with her… well, her own zoo.” She nodded to one of the servants, who lifted a hand with three and a half fingers in something like an affirmation.

“They’re actually a lot better trained than the creatures back home. I only got bitten twice and poisoned once since I got here,” Jo said.

Eff grinned at the joke, then turned back to Techie. “We generally don’t really know a lot about Lady Kull, to be honest. She’s been here the shortest of all the Knights. I mean, I’ve only been here for five years myself, but I’ve heard of an older tech that she came here about ten years ago, and she has only been a proper Knight for two or three years.”

Techie looked down at his tray, gnawing on his lip.

“No reason to be down,” Eff said, shoveling one of her eggs onto his tray – she didn’t like them, so she usually distributed them among those people on her table who did. “They’re in a completely different category than us, you can’t forget that. Just do good work, and try to stay away from her. It’s really not our place to wonder about their motives. And honestly, it’s not like we have any chance to find out about them anyway.”

~*~

A day later, Krel called him on his comm-link when he was about to go to his room after dinner, and summoned him to her rooms.

After the few days of new normalcy he’d had, seeing Krel again made him far more nervous than he should have been. He didn’t know what to expect, and it frightened him. He still just really didn’t know how to feel about Krel. Of course, one the one hand, she had saved his life and had given him this new job, which was a lot better than what he’d had in the complex, for sure; but on the other hand, he was very, very aware that he did not belong to the Temple itself, like Eff and a few of the other techs seemed to, but to Krel in particular. And even though he didn’t think belonging to the Temple would have saved him from anything any of the Knights wanted to dish out, whether it was casual cruelty like Krel had shown him a few times or targeted malice like what he had experienced from Kolka, it still made him feel queasy to know that Krel had such specific power over him. Especially combined with the fact that he owed his life to her.

He put his hand against the lock to Krel’s door, and swallowed when it registered his comm-link and slid open with a low beep. He stepped in and looked around. There was nobody in the entrance area, but he could hear the sound of water sloshing in the back. The steam immediately made sweat beads appear on his forehead.

“Take off your clothes and come to the pools, guppy,” Krel’s voice called from the main part of the cave. For a second Techie wondered how she could know that it was him, before he remembered that she and the other Knights had powers that he would likely never understand.

He took off his jacket, his boots, his shirt, his pants. He carefully put his comm-link and his new goggles on top of his clothes, then looked down at himself. His cheeks started burning again when he put his hands on the waist of his underpants. Even though he told himself that she had already told him she wasn’t going to try and have sex with him, he was still wary of being naked around her. To be honest, he was wary of being naked around anybody. And some of Krel’s comments hadn’t helped either.

He finally did manage to take off his underwear, though. Now completely naked, he walked towards the center part of the cave.

Krel was sitting in one of the steaming pools, as naked as he was, her head leaning against the edge of the pool, her lethorns sprawling over her shoulders, with the horn part of them submerged in the water. Her eyes were closed, and she looked more relaxed than he could remember seeing her before; though there was something about the color of her skin that made Techie think that she looked tired. Of course, he hadn’t been around blue-skinned people a lot, so that could just be a normal variation.

“Come in,” she said without opening her eyes, and Techie obeyed. He climbed into the hot water, sighing lowly as it closed around his shoulders, and then submerged himself up to his chin for a moment and closed his eyes. Even with the situation being as precarious as it was, being completely surrounded by hot water was one of the nicest things he could ever imagine feeling.

“Come over here,” Krel ordered, and Techie opened his eyes again to look at her. She was looking at him, though with no particular malice in her eyes, and she had spread her legs to make space between them. He blushed a little, then he scooted over along the bench-like seating at the rim of the pool.

“How exactly…?” The pool was too deep to really stand on the floor, and there was no real space on the bench left in front of Krel. She didn’t answer, just reached for him and put her arms under his arms, then lifted him into her lap like a small child.

“Put your feet up on the seat over there,” she murmured, and he did so, which left him lying with his head against the fleshy part of her left lethorn, her arms around his chest, his feet propped up on the other side of the pool. It was awkward at first, especially since he was a good bit taller than Krel and he felt he would slip out of her arms at any moment, but finally he managed to relax a little against her. 

She let out a happy little sigh and nuzzled her nose into his hair.

“You smell better than the last time I saw you. A lot less sickly,” she said, then she pushed her lips to his temple for a second, which nearly made him jump. He just closed his eyes and willed himself to hold still, to let her do whatever she wanted with him. If she wanted to nuzzle and kiss and cuddle him, then that would definitely be a lot better than most other things she could do to him.

“Have you been taking your pills?” she asked, again nosing his hair and rubbing her cheek against his head. Her skin felt cool against him, a contrast to the hot water, but not unpleasant.

Techie nodded. “Y-yes, my lady.”

“Good,” Krel said lowly, the lazy tone in her voice heavier, making Techie believe that she really was rather tired. “Such a good boy…” And then she yawned, which proved Techie’s suspicion and made him immediately relax. He couldn’t imagine that she was planning anything nefarious in this state, and he would survive being used as a teddy bear for a while.

One of her hands started petting his belly in slow, circular motions, and surprisingly, Techie found his own eyelids drooping. Still feeling secure enough in her arms, he closed his eyes and turned his head a little to nuzzle closer against the soft, cushy part of her lethorn. Krel rubbed the tip of her nose against his forehead, then she drew back again and left him alone for a while.

He listened to her slow, rhythmic breathing, felt the heat of the water around him, the gentle circles her fingers were rubbing into his skin. This was… surprisingly nice. He had never done a lot of cuddling. The space in the arms of the cook at his first master’s home had been reserved for the child who had been there fastest, or who was the current favorite of the cook, and none of the other adults really had any interest in taking time out of their already busy schedule to give out a lot of hugs, and at night the children had all been locked in their room, so that there was no real chance for them to find the warm arms of a grown-up to sleep in. And when he had been grown-up himself, the only time anybody would hug him had been during the fumbling, mostly unsatisfactory sexual encounters he’d had with other slaves or, at the complex, with other lower-ranking Clan members. There had been a time in his late teens when he had somehow managed to arouse the interest of a nephew of his master, who had actually fucked him in his room a few times, but there hadn’t been a lot of cuddling after those incidents either.

Actually getting physical contact like this, without sex before, during or after, wasn’t something he had actually expected. As far as he had learned, this wasn’t something that adults did. As far as he had learned, from observation and experience, the only kind of physical contact adults exchanged was sexual or violent. You didn’t touch somebody unless you wanted to beat him up or fuck him. That was just how it was. There were some exceptions, like when the fighters of the MaMa Clan thumped each other on the back for doing good work, but that was pretty much it.

But he had learned so much since he had come here that he was very ready to also accept this new kind of touching. After all, he was living in a Temple devoted to a group of people who could look into other people’s minds, control wild beasts, and move things with their thoughts. He guessed that it was just par for the course that some things were different here.

They stayed like that for a while. Techie didn’t know how long, since he kept dozing off, lulled to sleep by the warm water and Krel’s regular breathing, but finally, Krel let out a loud yawn and then pressed another kiss to Techie’s temple.

“It’s time for bed,” she said. “Come on, let’s get you out of the water.”

Techie had to blink a few times to get properly out of his dozing, but then he nodded, holding back a little yawn of his own. Bed sounded good. He felt so relaxed that he could likely have fallen asleep on the floor of the cave, but he really better went back to his room, to his fresh bedding and his soft blanket and pillows.

They both climbed out of the tub and Techie let Krel towel him dry again. He still didn’t like it very much, but Krel was making little cooing sounds, and in his half-sleeping state, he did enjoy that part of it. When Krel came to his hands, she turned them palm-up and ran her fingers over his water-wrinkly skin, then she let out a low laugh.

“It’s so funny that you land-breathers wrinkle up like that,” she said with a grin, then she lifted his hand to her mouth and gave him a little kiss on his wrinkly forefinger. “I keep wondering if you’d just completely dissolve if you stayed long enough in the water. Just turn into seafoam… I wonder if that’s what happens to those land-breathers who drown and aren’t washed up to the seashore…”

There was a strange contemplativeness in her voice, and even though Techie didn’t really understand what she was talking about – humans didn’t dissolve in water, didn’t she know that? – he felt as if he was listening to her uttering some kind of great philosophical question. As if there was more behind her words than what she was saying. And that feeling, the feeling that she might be communicating to him something deep, something personal, gave Techie pause.

But the moment ended as suddenly as it had started, and she let go of his hand and went on to dry the rest of him. When she was finally done, she told him to have a good night, and that she would call for him when she wanted to see him again. He nodded and thanked her – for what, he didn’t quite know, but it felt right – and went to get his clothes.

“Oh, I nearly forgot,” Krel said as she came around the bend to the entrance area, where Techie was just putting his pants back on, “Go to Kolka tomorrow morning and get his helmet. There’s something wrong with it, I don’t know, he’ll tell you what it is. He wants Sizzly to take a look at it.”

Techie nodded immediately, though the request was a little strange. Why wouldn’t Kolka just give his helmet to one of the servants that came and went in his room? Wouldn’t that be easier?

“Because our helmets are special,” Krel said, startling Techie. He really didn’t think that he would ever get used to the whole mind-reading thing… Krel grinned, and he was pretty sure that she had read his thoughts again, which just made him blush.

“Basically, we don’t hand our helmets to anybody. So, you could say it’s an honor that he trusts you to take it to Sizzly.”

“Yes, my lady,” he answered, put his shirt, boots and comm-link on and left with his jacket in his hand after he gave a little bow in Krel’s direction. Only when he was out of the room did he allow himself to think that that was an honor that he doubted he actually wanted…


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uhm, there is a LOT of bad stuff happening in this chapter. If you get triggered or squicked out by child abuse, torture, death, etc., just be careful.
> 
> Also, there is gonna be sex in this chapter. Kind of a wild right, but well.

Except for a few teasing remarks by Kolka when he came to get the helmet, nothing significant happened in the next few days, which made Techie feel happier than he had in a long time. He finally felt secure, for a lack of a better word; he had a feeling that his mistress didn’t actually plan to do anything bad to him, he got along better and better with Sizzly, who didn’t talk a lot in general, but whose silent companionship was still really comfortable, and he was getting along with the other techs, not just those from Eff’s friend group, but also most of those he had met at the weekly briefings. He still didn’t talk much, but when he did, nobody made fun of his stutter, nobody rushed him to speak faster, and if he made a mistake, which had only happened once in the two weeks he had been here now, he wasn’t yelled at or talked down to, but Sizzly or one of the other security techs just explained what he had done wrong. He enjoyed his work, he liked the people he worked with, and he wasn’t even especially afraid of Kolka anymore. And as far as he had heard, Lord Kylo was supposed to come back any day now. He might not know what exactly Kylo felt for him, but he still felt his stomach flutter just at the thought of being in the same room as him again.

So when he walked around a corner in the Knights’ wing after their weekly briefing, Kolka’s repaired helmet in his hands, and saw Lady Kull standing right in front of him, he suddenly felt his heart drop into his stomach. He had forgotten about this. And now reality was coming to punish him for thinking he could just be happy.

The fear that welled up in him made him see everything that happened as if in slow motion. Lady Kull was not wearing her mask, so Techie could watch as her facial expression changed. She was surprised at first, her eyes opening wider as she saw him, her brown eyebrows rising, her jaw falling slack. But that was only for a second, and then her jaw clenched, her brows drew down, her eyes narrowed. She bared her teeth at him as she came walking towards him. Techie knew that he should turn on his heel and run, but his legs wouldn’t obey him; like always, when he was in danger, he was absolutely useless. Helpless. Frozen in place.

“Why are _you_ still here?!” Kull snarled, then her hand shot out and grabbed Techie’s throat, whirled him around, slammed him into the wall. Techie let out a scared squeak that hardly got through his closed-up throat, and dropped the helmet as his body slammed into the wall. The clattering of the metal on the floor hardly registered in his ears over the panicked beating of his own heart.

Kull was shorter than him, so the pressure of her hand pushed at the bottom of his jaw, made him feel queasy and kept him from looking down, from actually looking at her.

“Why the fuck are you still here?!” she demanded again, yelling this time. Her hand yanked him to the side, and at the same time one of her leg kicked against the side of Techie’s ankle, and he fell to the floor at her feet.

She kicked his thigh, then his side, faster than Techie could react. He let out another pathetic whimper and rolled up into a ball, hoping to give her as little a target as possible.

“Do you think you fucking belong here, huh? Do you think you have any fucking right to be alive?! Just looking at you makes me sick, and I’ve fucking killed people for less, so why the fuck shouldn’t I just kick your ugly, stamped head in, huh?! Fucking answer me, you piece of off-market trash,” she yelled and pulled her leg back for another kick when Techie finally found his voice again.

“Please, please, stop,” he whimpered, his voice high-pitched and panicked. He managed to roll on all fours, still half curled up, putting his forehead on the floor, prostrating himself in front of her. “Please, please, Mistress, please, I’ll do anything, please, don’t hurt me, I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t hurt me…”

The kick he was expecting didn’t come.

Confused, relieved, and still afraid for his life, Techie dared to peek up, and regretted it instantly. Kull was looking at him with a look in her eyes he had never seen before. Her face was paler than it had just been, and he thought he could see shock, confusion, but there was also something so intense, so burning that he thought the mere power of her eyes would make him vaporize in an instant. Hatred, he thought, that was what he was seeing. It was so rare, he had seen it so few times, that he hardly recognized it, but it couldn’t be anything else. Lady Kull was looking at him with a hatred so vibrant that he was wondering why the walls around them were not crumbling to dust.

And then something grabbed him, something invisible, irresistible, and he was hurled across the hallway, smashed against a wall and thrown on his back. And then Kull was there, over him, her face just inches away from him, one hand on his throat, the other hand slamming into his forehead.

He fell, fell, fell into a vortex of darkness, a storm of black lightning, deeper and deeper until nothing existed anymore.

And out of this nothing, images emerged.

He knew these images. He remembered. Or yet, something inside of him remembered, because the conscious part of his mind had long pushed away these memories, had buried them as deep as possible. But that didn’t matter, because now they came back, pushing into him like freshly sharpened knives.

The face of Orny, the old servant who had taken care of him when he had come to his first master, who had helped him find his way in the large house, had secretly reminded him of duties he had forgotten, so he wouldn’t be punished, had even lied for him when he had destroyed a rug from some distant planet by spilling cleaning bleach on it.

Now his face was slowly turning blue, as his body was crushed beneath another large rock, and another, and another, a pyramid built on his frail, old body. It was the punishment for theft, carried out in front of the whole household, and Techie had to watch, just like all the other children. He was standing next to the boy who had actually stolen the brooch, who had been caught nearly red-handed because they had found it under his mattress; who would have been in Orny’s place if the old man hadn’t told their master that it was him who had put the brooch there to hide it, that he had stolen it, that the boy had nothing to do with it.

Techie would only learn about all the other children after his horrible death, after the last crack of his breaking bones, after his last wheezing breath, about all the other children he had helped, just as he had helped him.

-

The bench in the kitchen yard, where he was made to bend over by their foreman, because he had done bad work with the silverware, again. He felt the bite of the whip on his skin, the first time ever, and he cried like any nine-year-old would, and the whip just came down harder, and he could smell his own blood…

-

The intricate pattern of the floor in the reception hall, after a large party, the dirt in the joints between the marble tiles where the master’s son had been sick, the cramps in his fingers, the blood smears his knees left behind, through his trousers; the endless, burning pain as he kept trying to get rid of that blood before anybody saw, but there was so much of it, and it just kept coming…

-

The rough hands of the market medic his master had taken him to before selling him to a trader, the pain when he had pushed his fingers into his additional hole, the incredible pain in his head when they had inked the world ‘male’ into his forehead, the feeling as if they were carving it in his skull, the nauseating knowledge that he was damaged, that he was what the traders called off-market, barely good enough to be sold in the stinking pens at the edge of the slave market, a bargain, hardly worth enough credits for his master to cover the expense of his trip to this trading planet…

-

The first time he had seen MaMa. The grin on her face, exposing blackened teeth, the way she had grabbed his jaw to take a closer look at him. “Good enough.” Her voice, forever the narration of his nightmares.

-

The chain they had used to make sure he didn’t leave his screens the first few years.

-

The copper wires that had been his only diversion. The pain when MaMa had bound them around his fingers and had waited for them to turn blue before she allowed him to beg her to take them off.

-

MaMa’s knife.

-

The look on MaMa’s face when he woke up after he had fallen asleep after working for far too long. The change in her eyes when he begged her for mercy, stuttered that his eyes had hurt so badly, that he had just closed them for a minute to make the burning stop, that he had never wanted to disobey. The way she had run her fingers over his cheek. The sound of her tutting, her honeyed words, so unusual for her that they took Techie completely aback. “Oh, my poor boy. Poor little tired baby. Those pretty green eyes of yours just don’t seem to be strong enough to let you do your work, hmm?”

The burn on his scalp, the shock that went through him when she hauled him off his chair, over to an empty table. The feeling of the hands of her bodyguards when they pushed into his biceps, holding him still. His own screaming, strangely distant.

Her fingers coming closer, long nails dotted with rests of chipping black polish.

Pain, incredible pain, red, and then complete, utter darkness, and a stench he would never forget as vicious fluid ran down his cheeks.

-

The first time he had seen his bionic eyes in a mirror.

-

Suddenly there was a pain that didn’t come from his memories. His throat felt as if somebody had ripped it open, his head burned like fire, and somebody was screaming.

No, he was screaming.

Kylo was above him, masked, his hand around Kull’s throat like hers had been around Techie’s. He was lifting her in the air, then he threw her with unnatural ease against the wall, telling her to get out of his sight, now.

At the edge of his mind, Techie registered that there were other Knights in the hallway now; he didn’t know where they had come from, and he didn’t care, because all he saw was Kylo, Kylo who was shaking, who seemed to be surrounded by a red glow. He whirled around and came to him, grabbed him by his arm and pulled him up, then put the hand to the scruff of his neck and marched him off. Techie’s body followed without any input of his mind. He still didn’t feel like he was quite there, quite at the same place, in the same universe as Kylo. He felt as if his mind was caught behind a wall of transparisteel, watching his body react to a world he couldn’t reach.

Kylo dragged him through a door, then slammed his hand on the closing mechanism.

Before Techie could say anything, ask anything, Kylo grabbed him again, by his collar this time, pulling him with him to another door, a smaller one, which he opened and then shoved Techie inside. The door slammed close behind him, and Techie only needed to look around for a split-second before he realized that he was in a closet. Panic filled him again, made his heart push into his throat. Was he going to be punished? Was this some kind of cell? Was Kylo angry with – 

Suddenly he heard a noise coming from outside, an angry scream, then a loud crash, and another, and another. It sounded as if the Temple was coming down; he could feel the vibrations rattle the walls of the closet. He didn’t know what was going on, but the noises were enough to frighten him into the backmost corner of the closet, where he covered his ears with his shaking hands and pressed his eyes closed, trying to escape, trying to be anything but here, in a tiny closet while the world seemed to be ending outside its door.

He was cowering in his corner, his arms crossed in front of his face to cover his ears and his eyes at the same time, when the closet stopped shaking around him. There was a moment of complete quiet, and even though he lowered his arms, he stayed cowered into a tiny ball, ready to pull his arms over his head at any moment to protect himself from whatever was happening out there; from whatever Kylo was doing out there. The fear was acrid and ice-cold in his chest, but it had pulled him back through the pane of transparisteel, had brought him back into the here and now.

His breath was still coming fast, and he pushed farther back into the corner when he suddenly heard the noise of booted feet – a noise he knew so well – approach his closet. The opening mechanism triggered, and the door slid to the side, revealing Kylo’s broad silhouette against the bright light of the room beyond. He couldn’t see Kylo’s face, and he stayed in his corner, not knowing if he was still angry, but Kylo didn’t come charging forward, and he didn’t yell at him, and those were already two very good signs in Techie’s book.

“Come out,” he said, his voice rough but not angry; it just sounded like he had yelled too much. Techie was still shaking, but he nevertheless stood up and slowly walked towards Kylo, who stepped aside to let him into the room.

He had not had a chance to take a good look at the room before he had been pushed into the closet, but he was pretty sure he would have noticed if it had looked like this before. There were parts of… things… strewn everywhere. He thought he could make out a table leg between a couple of pieces of metal, and there were cables hanging out of the wall, over a heap of metal and hard cast-plast that might have been a console at some point. Everything seemed to be charred; the metal’s edges were half melted and half burned, parts of the cast-plast had melted and gave off that disgusting smell of burnt plastic. There were even charred parts on the wall, as if somebody had worked them over with a huge blow-torch.

The cold fear from before came over him again, but now it settled deeper, in his stomach instead of his chest. A deep shiver came over him as he looked around at Kylo; not his face, he wasn’t courageous enough to do that just yet, but his hands. There was no trace of any burning there, or on his clothes, but he had been the only person in this room, this had to be his doing. He knew what the Knights could do, he had seen enough of it through his security screens, and he had seen Kylo’s red sword as well, had seen the way it cut through people as if they were no thicker than flimsi, but this…

It was different, being in a destructed room than watching the destruction from the safety of a security room.

Kylo came closer to him. Techie instinctively pulled his arms up, but Kylo caught his wrists, holding them with such strength and at the same time such care that he didn’t even think to struggle.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said in a low, rumbling voice. “I won’t hurt you.”

He let go of his wrists, and Techie let them sink down slowly. He knew that there was no guarantee that he was telling the truth, but what other option did he have? He definitely would not disobey him.

“That’s good,” he said, and then one of those long hands grabbed his chin and pushed his face up so he was looking into Kylo’s. The look in his eyes was completely breathtaking.

Techie couldn’t describe this look, but later he would still remember the feeling it caused him. His fear melted and was replaced with prickling surprise, and then with tingly warmth that came up all the way to his eyes and once again made him wish he could still cry. Kylo looked at him like that for a long moment, then he leaned forward and kissed his lips, slow and painfully gentle. Techie closed his eyes, pushed into the kiss. His hands found some of the fabric of Kylo’s robes, and he held on to him as one of Kylo’s hands ran through his hair.

But unlike every other time they had kissed, this time it was Techie who ended it. He didn’t know what happened – it felt as if a wall he had built haphazardly, with nothing but loose cables and scrap metal, which he had kept in his back so he didn’t have to fight on two sides at the same time, now became obsolete, because there was no fight in front of him anymore. The wall crumbled, and ugly sobs started to pour out of Techie, and he pulled back from Kylo and pushed his hand against his mouth to keep them in. The memories weren’t gone. He wasn’t caught in his head anymore, but the memories were still there, and now that he had remembered, he couldn’t stop the looping images in his head. His owner. Orny. The Foreman.

MaMa.

He felt his whole body shiver with the pure horror of MaMa’s memory, and his legs gave out. He sank to the floor, in front of Kylo, his hands braced just inches from his boots, his terror-filled sobs turning into heaving as he started to hyperventilate in his panic, whining, high-pitched noises as his lungs seemed to close up.

There were hands again, and suddenly he was being pulled up, then lifted into Kylo’s arms. His clammy fingers immediately sought the fabric of Kylo’s robe again, clinging to it as he closed his eyes and tried to get air into his lungs, just a little bit. Kylo carried him out of the room and into another, smaller part of the quarters, where a large bed took up most of the space. He was laid down on the soft blankets. Kylo leaned over him, ran his hand over his forehead.

“Relax,” he whispered, and Techie could feel the painful tension drain out of his body, could feel his lungs opening up. He let out another sob in relief, but this time wasn’t as wonderful as the other two times had been. His body was relaxed, and his mind was not spiraling anymore, yes, but…

Kylo stood up. “You can sleep here tonight,” he said, and turned to go.

Techie did not know where he took the courage to reach out and grab his sleeve; it was likely a deed of desperation.

“P-Please,” he whispered, his own throat still raw from screaming earlier and sobbing now. “Please…” Kylo turned around, a frown on his face, and Techie swallowed and looked down. He didn’t know if he was going too far, but he couldn’t be alone now, he just couldn’t, so he licked his dry lips and looked at Kylo’s face again.

“Please don’t leave me… It’s…” His voice broke, and he tried again. “It’s still there…”

He didn’t know how to explain, but Kylo seemed to understand. He sat down next to him on the bed and ran his hand over his forehead again.

“It’s a torture technique,” he said lowly, and Techie shivered, either from his words or the fingertips touching his temple. “She should never have used it on you…”

Techie hesitated for a moment before he reached up and grasped Kylo’s hand. Carefully, ready to let go as soon as Kylo showed any sign that he wanted him to, he pulled it down to his lips, and kissed his knuckles reverently. Kylo had saved him. Kylo had pulled him out of his head. And now he was sitting here, being so incredibly kind even though he was the leader of all these powerful people and Techie was nothing…

“Please don’t leave me alone…” he whispered again, and looked up into Kylo’s dark eyes.

There was hesitation in his eyes, and for a moment Techie was sure he’d pull away, leave him alone in the room, alone with his regrets, but then Kylo leaned down and kissed him again.

Something bloomed in Techie’s chest like it hadn’t during any of the other kisses. All of those other times had been spontaneous, spur of the moment, and over before they had even begun. This time was deliberate, and the slow pressure of Kylo’s lips, the wetness of his tongue, told Techie that this was not going to be another five-second kiss that would end with Kylo storming off.

Techie opened his mouth for his tongue, and pushed his own against him. He tasted like iron and heat, and the strange feeling of two tongues sliding against each other drove Techie crazy. He had been kissed a few times, but never like this. The kiss kept going, and Kylo’s hand, which Techie had relinquished by now, ran down his shoulder, to the zipper of his uniform jacket.

The low, purring noise of the zipper made Techie shiver into the kiss. He dared to put one hand on the back of Kylo’s head, just to thread his fingers through his hair and at least feel like he could keep him close. He hardly dared to hope that Kylo would fuck him, he still believed that something would happen that would keep him from doing it, that he might just undress him and then tuck him in and say goodnight, but by all the planets in the galaxy, he wanted him to fuck him so badly. If he could have Master Kylo inside of him, if he could feel his skin against his own, everything would be well, everything would turn out right…

He wanted to beg, but he didn’t dare break the kiss, or break the silence around them. If anything happened, maybe this dream would burst like a soap bubble. Kylo put one hand on the back of his neck and gently pulled him up so he could take off his jacket, then that same hand ran over his neck, his throat, dipped under his collar and tugged on it. Techie had to break the kiss now, no matter how much he didn’t want to do it, and lift his arms so Kylo could take off his shirt.

When the shirt hit the floor beside the bed, Techie opened his lips for another kiss, but Kylo just put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down. He looked up at Kylo with insecurity and fear gnawing on his insides, but the look Kylo gave him just made another shiver run down his body, made even more blood pool between his legs. Kylo’s eyes looked black with how wide his pupils were, his mouth was slightly open and his nostrils flaring with the strength of his breath. He was staring at him with an intensity that nearly frightened Techie, but then he leaned down and kissed him again, harder than the time before, more demanding, pushing his tongue into his mouth and lapping into him and sucking at his lips.

His hands were warm against his naked skin, so different from Krel’s. And they were big, too, spanning his whole chest as he put both of them on his ribs, running them down the sensitive skin of his torso. Fingertips rubbed over his nipples, dipped into his navel, ran over the bones of his hips.

“So soft,” Kylo rumbled against his lips, then his mouth moved down, over his jaw to his throat. Techie stiffened slightly when he felt those warm lips at his Adam’s apple, sure he’d be bitten, but there was no pain, just the delicious heat of a tongue lapping at skin that he couldn’t remember had ever been touched like that. It felt incredible, made him moan out loud, made his brain send sparks to every part of his body. Kylo’s hands were resting on his hips now, just the thumbs running over the bit of skin right over his trousers.

“Please,” Techie whispered, closing his eyes to feel as much of this as he could. “Please, m-my lord…”

Kylo came up from his throat, but just to let his tongue run back over his jaw and then behind his ear, making Techie quake. “What is it that you want?” he whispered, enticingly, with the smallest bit of amusement in his voice that gave Techie the courage to actually ask.

“Please…” He swallowed, then bent his head away from Kylo so he had more space to lick his neck there, “please f-fuck me…” 

He could feel Kylo’s broad mouth widen even more as he grinned. “As you wish,” he said, but then he pulled back, and Techie grabbed his arm in panic.

“Don’t go,” he whispered, his voice high and hardly audible.

Kylo ran his free hand over Techie’s head. “If I want to fuck you, I need a few things first.”

But Techie didn’t want to let him go, and even though he could feel his cheeks burning up, he whispered: “You can do it raw, I don’t mind…”

Kylo looked at him for a moment, then he leaned down and kissed his lips again, short and soft. “I won’t do that to you.” Then he pulled back, shaking Techie’s now loose hand off, and went to a cupboard in the corner.

Techie didn’t know if Kylo wanted to do the rest of his undressing or if he was expecting him to do that, but his cock was so hard and painful by now that he took the liberty to shuffle awkwardly out of his pants. Kylo hadn’t been very authoritative up to now, so he hoped that it would be okay that he’d done something without his express permission. But when Kylo turned around and saw him naked on the bed, the look he gave him was definitely approving.

He came back to the bed and put a packet of lube and a packaged barrier next to Techie, then he climbed over him again and immediately caught his lips in another kiss. His hands ran down Techie’s chest again, and then there was a hand around his cock, and Techie felt as if he was going to die; there was just no way anything could feel this good.

He moaned into Kylo’s mouth, a begging, helpless little noise that seemed to draw forth from the depths of his body, and Kylo pulled his hand over the length of his cock, then pushed back down, stroking him slowly, deliberately. There were calluses on his hands, scars and patches of burnt skin that Techie had never paid any particular attention to with his eyes, but now that they were rubbing against his most sensitive part, he couldn’t help but register every single one of them. He put his hand on the back of Kylo’s head again, grabbed hold of him, not just to keep him close but to keep himself anchored, and pushed his tongue into Kylo’s mouth with a brazenness he had never felt before.

This time it was Kylo who moaned, and the noise drove through Techie like fire, fire that gathered right between his legs and made him push up into the wonderful touch of that huge hand. Kylo’s tongue pushed against Techie’s now, playing around it and caressing it until Techie was gasping not just from the touch on his cock. Finally, Kylo pulled out of the kiss and let his lips glide over his chin, down to his neck, where he started to lick and kiss his sensitive skin, the hand that wasn’t dealing with his cock now running over his belly, his chest, fingertips rubbing over a nipple. Techie arched into the touches, whining and moaning as he felt the first drops of precum drip off his tip, smoothening the motions of Kylo’s hand.

It had been so very long since another person had touched him in this way, and even though Techie had dreaded Krel or Kolka doing this, now that he was with Kylo, out of his own volition, because he had asked for it, he just felt so absolutely wonderful, so absolutely overwhelmed that he really didn’t know how much more he would be able to take. If he kept rubbing his cock like that, he’d likely be spilling before Kylo could even make use of that barrier that was still lying next to them… And Kylo didn’t seem to be making any attempt to start fucking him.

So he took that into his own hands again. With his face flushing so hot that he felt like boiling, he pushed Kylo away, then put his hand under one of his knees and pulled it up, presenting himself to Kylo with his legs spread like a needy whore. “P-please,” he whispered, his voice trembling. “Please put it in…”

Kylo seemed surprised for a moment, but then his eyes clouded and he leaned forward to push another kiss against Techie’s lips. “You’re dangerously sweet,” he whispered as his hand ran over the underside of the thigh he was stretching up. “A lesser man might just devour you whole…” His hand reached his buttock now, and a long finger ran down his crease, touching the very outside of his entrance and making the breath hitch in Techie’s chest.

Kylo licked over his lips, licked over his tongue when Techie dutifully opened his mouth. He licked into him for a moment, then broke the kiss again as his finger started rubbing gentle circles into his muscle.

“So sweet…” he murmured, “you’re going to feel so good around my cock… I bet you’d never even fight if I’d use you just for my pleasure, just push in and take you until you’re crying…”

Techie knew it was perverse, that those words should make him feel frightened, should make him want to fight, to run away, but they just sent a visible shiver down his body. “Oh fuck,” he whispered, lips parted around his hard breathing. “Oh please… Please…”

A small smile appeared on that large mouth, and then Kylo bent down again and kissed his cheek, let his lips run to his ear and gently bit his earlobe. “I know you’d be happy if I did that, sweet thing, but I want to make you enjoy it too…”

The finger pulled away, and then came back just a moment later, wet with lube now.

“Relax,” Kylo whispered. There was no magical command behind his voice now, but still Techie felt his body grow softer in anticipation. His finger pushed into him, slowly, carefully, and Techie let out a groan. The leg he was holding up was shaking by now, but he kept his grip on it, too afraid that Kylo might stop if he changed his position. Broad, soft lips were kissing his neck again, and he stared at the ceiling, his lips parted, listening to his own heavy breath and the softer breath of the Knight who was about to take him.

After the first finger had been moving inside of him for a while, getting him used to the feeling of being filled, a second finger pushed against his entrance. He gasped lowly, but did his best to relax enough to let Kylo push that finger in as well. His fingers weren’t just long, but also thick enough to drive sweat onto Techie’s forehead. His breath came in shivering bursts now, and he had started biting his lip to have somewhere to put the nervous energy his body was producing.

Kylo didn’t need long to push a third finger into him, and by that point, Techie was trembling all over and gasping with every breath. His hand was nearly unable to keep his leg up any longer, but he persevered, until Kylo finally pulled out and reached for the barrier.

“Put your leg down,” the Knight ordered, and Techie let out a relieved little sigh as he obeyed. He watched as Kylo shrugged out of his tunic and breeches and then attached the barrier and lubed his cock up. The mere sight of it made Techie shiver – he had assumed that Kylo would be proportionate, and he had been imagining his cock quite a few times now, but actually seeing it was quite a different thing. It was glorious, true; an instrument fitting for somebody so grand and powerful. But he wondered if he would be strong enough to take it – if he would manage to relax enough to let him in. He didn’t want to disappoint him, and if Kylo didn’t want to take him by force, it’d be Techie’s responsibility to try and get that in without hurting himself.

“When have you done this last?” Kylo asked, his fingers rubbing over his hole again.

Techie blushed again. “Not… not in a few years…” he mumbled, averting his eyes a little so he didn’t have to show Kylo just how embarrassed that question was making him. To be honest, he had not the slightest right to be embarrassed. After all, it was him who had asked for this, and who had begged Kylo to fuck him. He couldn’t be both a willing slut and a blushing prude. He really should stick with one.

“Alright,” Kylo said, then he bent down and kissed Techie’s lips again. The touch made Techie’s thoughts melt into the background, and he closed his eyes and opened his mouth to enjoy what Kylo was giving him. They kissed for a while, with Kylo’s hands running over his thighs, his belly, his buttocks, drawing little gasps and shudders from Techie. He was so hot, so full of need, but he didn’t dare push Kylo again; and anyway, he loved the way he was touching him so much, he wouldn’t have made Kylo stop even if his cock threatened to explode with pleasure.

Kylo finally pulled back from the kiss and got up on his knees.

“It’s likely going to hurt a bit right when I get in. It should be a dull pain, and only weak. If it hurts too much, or if you feel a piercing pain, I want you to tell me.” He took Techie’s chin in hand and moved his head so that Techie had to look into his eyes. “That is an order. Understood?”

The slightly rougher tone of his voice at those last words made Techie’s entire skin tingle with heat.

“Yes, my lord,” he whispered.

“Good…” Kylo grabbed his ankles and pushed his legs back, then he settled as close to him as he could. He let one of his legs rest on his shoulders to free up one hand, and then Techie could feel the blunt head of his cock against his already slick hole.

“Just keep calm and breath,” Kylo said, and then he pushed in.

It felt strange at first. It wasn’t painful, not really, just a dull pressure as his muscles tried to keep Kylo out. But it was strange to feel filled – to feel something enter him, even if it wasn’t forced inside. He knew the pain of being fucked without adequate preparation, or just with too much zest and not enough patience, and he would lie if he didn’t admit that he had sometimes tried to replicate this pain when he was touching himself, but this was just slow and intrusive and overwhelming; and then something seemed to give, and Kylo just slid into him, farther and farther.

He breathed slowly, tried to relax around the massive cock inside of him. He felt as if Kylo’s cock was pushing against his stomach, so deep did he seem to be. Every part of his body seemed to be focused on nothing but the pressure inside of him, a pressure that was hardly bearable, not because it had suddenly started to hurt, but because it was just so _much_. He let out a little whimper, wriggled a little under Kylo to see if he couldn’t get a little relief, but then Kylo touched his cock and the whimper turned into a moan. Yes, this was better, definitely.

Kylo bent over him again and kissed his chin. His whole body was pushing against Techie now, naked skin to naked skin, and again Techie shivered. This was what he had wanted; having Kylo inside of him, against him, completely engulfing him with his huge, massive body. Kylo let go of his cock and grabbed his wrists, pulled them up over his head, holding him there as his lips met Techie’s again. The kiss was slow and lazy, as if Kylo wasn’t balls-deep inside of him, as if Techie’s cock wasn’t rubbing up against a set of firm, smooth abs. Kylo seemed to be everywhere, taking in his whole world, and it absolutely drove him crazy.

He only started to move when Techie got so impatient that he actually pushed back against his cock. Kylo was still kissing him, and Techie, greedy for every touch he would give him, welcomed every sweep of his tongue. With his mouth open to grant complete access to the Knight, every single one of his noises came flowing out freely. He wanted to give Kylo everything of himself, and as his thrusts became faster, harder, and his moans became louder; he felt as if he was evaporating, turning into heat, being absorbed into Kylo’s equally hot body.

They were both sweating by now. Kylo’s skin was sliding against Techie’s, his body was pushing him farther into the mattress, his mouth was devouring him, his cock splitting him in half. Techie could feel his own precum searing between their two bellies, could feel his orgasm build in the depth of his loins. But it was just not enough yet… It wasn’t, quite, just…

“If you want to come, you have to tell me what you need,” Kylo whispered against his lips, and with a little gasp Techie realized that he had been reading his thoughts. He really would never get used to that. But if Kylo already knew what he was thinking… Putting it into actual words wouldn’t hurt, right?

“P-please… Can you… go a bit harder?”

He could feel Kylo’s grin against his lips, and then he pulled away, let go of his hands and grabbed his knees again to push them back and change his angle.

“Of course, sweet thing,” he whispered, then thrust into him quite a bit harder than any of his movements before. Techie moaned and threw his head back, pushing himself closer to Kylo, but to no avail, since his legs were held firmly in his grasp.

“Anything else?” he asked with a grin, and Techie swallowed and gave a tiny nod.

“Can you… can you… can you t-touch like, both of my…?”

Before he had managed to finish his request, Kylo had already changed his grip on his legs so that he was now holding both of them in the air in front of him, his hand around both of his ankles, as his other hand grabbed his cock with his fingers and his thumb went down to the little additional hole just beneath.

“Fuck, you’re so wet,” he moaned, and Techie felt a rush of pride at just how aroused he sounded. That thumb rubbed along the edge for a few moments, then pushed in and started to move in and out. He started thrusting again, and timed his thrusts with the movement of the hand caressing Techie’s genitals – thrust forward, hand down, thumb in; pull back, hand up, thumb out.

Techie couldn’t remember ever feeling so good. His body was vibrating with pleasure, heat was boiling between his legs, he felt as if he was going to burst at any moment. He closed his eyes, bit his lip, concentrated on all those feelings. It was dizzying and overwhelming and incredible and yet it soon became too much, too good, too hot. He felt a shudder run through his whole body and he pushed harder against Kylo, whining, pleading. The thrusts became harder, the touches rougher, and then, finally, Techie came with a high-pitched sob. His seed sprayed all over his belly and up to his chest, while Kylo’s thrusts became harder, more erratic, and finally the Knight himself stopped moving and, one hand still grasping Techie’s genitals hard, spilled deep inside of him.

The ebbing waves of his body’s excitement rolled over Techie as he slowly came down from his climax. Kylo remained inside of him for a few moments, then he leaned forward – not giving the mess on Techie’s belly that now also stuck to his own a second thought – and kissed his lips again.

He didn’t say anything after that, just grabbed a piece of clothing from somewhere and cleaned the jizz off both of their bellies and from between Techie’s thighs, then he laid down next to him and pulled him into his arms. The sex had been wonderful, but this was even more than that; it made Techie’s heart melt, feeling those strong arms holding him, feeling Kylo’s chest against his cheek, hearing his heart beating. He closed his eyes and let out a low sigh as he let himself sink into the feelings in his body, the relaxed, warm, vibrant calm of satisfaction that had spread inside of him. His head felt woozy, heavy, and empty all at the same time. He felt Kylo’s breath sync up with his own, felt his warmth, his firmness. He felt absolutely safe for the first time in so long…

A few more moments later, he was deep asleep, and not a single nightmare found its way into his dreams.


	10. Chapter 10

Kylo woke Techie up in the morning, before he had to leave for his first training session of the day.

It was a strange thing to do, nearly as strange as what he had done the previous evening. Not the sex – it might have been unorthodox to use one of the Temple’s personnel for it, but physical satisfaction had never been something the Knights of Ren denied themselves – but the amount of softness he had shown him. The amount of pity.

He was dangerously close to the Light Side. His feelings had been tender, sweet, loving nearly. If he had just desired him, if he had just been aroused by his mental anguish or enraged by Kull intruding into somebody who he had started to consider as ‘his’, it would have been alright; it would have been congruous with the essence of the dark side. But while he had fucked him because he wanted him, he had done it in a way that had been designed to set Techie at ease, to make him relax, to free him of his pain – and that was more than he should ever have given to anybody.

He had been induced into action by the same emotions his old teacher had always preached.

As if to account for his weakness last night, his training was especially rigorous. He had decided to fight against droids today from the very beginning, instead of warming up with several standard repetitions, and he was trying to bring himself into a fury as he slashed through robot after robot.

But the fury just wouldn’t come. Anger eluded him. There was only disappointment, and exhaustion, and a flicker of fear that wasn’t strong enough on its own to re-establish his connection to the dark side.

He was weak. He knew that. He also knew that he should have killed Techie this morning, instead of waking him with a kiss to his forehead. Not because he desired him, but because of the deep, aching need he felt to protect him, to make the world a safe place for him. He knew that Darth Vader had felt the same way about Padme Amidala, but… Darth Vader must have been stronger than him. Maybe Darth Vader’s feelings had been stronger as well, more urgent, more fear-laced because he knew that his love was doomed. Maybe it was that Darth Vader had actually loved Padme Amidala, that he had had feelings for her that were far superior to what Kylo felt for Techie. He didn’t even think that he loved him. Not in the way he – dare he say it – loved the General. But he wanted to keep Techie save, to keep him out of harm’s way. With Hux, his blood boiled when he thought about him in battle, made him feel stronger and sharper, but just imagining Techie in any kind of confrontation made his guts roil.

But would it be enough to kill him? Or was the wound he had opened, this breach in his power that let in the light, too wide to seal with blood alone?

A droid’s head collided with the wall in a sea of red and blue sparks. Electric blue eyes blinked up at Kylo, then their light went out.

He needed to talk to Snoke.

~*~  
“You should have come to me earlier, my student.”

His master’s voice echoed through the throne hall at the center of the Temple.

Kylo was standing before his dais, struggling to keep his head up despite the shame he felt at his own weakness.

"Yes, master," he answered. "I thought the matter was too small to bother you, but I know now that I have been wrong."

Snoke nodded slowly, his yellow eyes on Kylo, digging into him as they always had, making him wish he was stronger, making him wish he could show Snoke his true potential.

"I understand why you wanted to take the boy with you in the first place. His similarity to the General is truly interesting, and I feel that you should explore the causes for this. Yet you made a mistake by making him a member of those who serve the Temple."

Kylo could feel a frown rising on his face, and he knew that Snoke also saw it.

"From the beginning, it was clear that he would create conflict among your Knights. This conflict could have been productive, and it might have helped your Knights to grow, especially the youngest, but instead of being a conflict just between two of your Knights, Kull allowed herself to direct her abundant, fruitful anger onto an absolutely worthless target. Using such an instant of connection to the Dark Side against somebody with hardly more worth than a dumb animal is waste. And your own weakness made it even worse. A simple slave cannot be reason for such wavering in the second most powerful Force user in the galaxy."

Kylo lowered his eyes in shame. Of course Snoke was right. Techie's only worth was in his face, his similarity to the General. Deluding himself that he would be useful to the Temple's security had been a mistake. He could have gotten a security-apt tech from the infinite human resources of the First Order, without inciting a conflict that might prove difficult to steer.

"Should I eliminate him, master?" He steeled his voice, steeled his mind. He did not even dare think of his heart. Techie was worse than worthless now - he had become a problem. Like a bug that had infiltrated a great machine and made its gears squeal.

He had expected his master to answer right away. But when Snoke kept silent for a while, obviously in thought, he felt an impertinent, unforgivable sliver of hope curl around his trecherous heart. No; no matter what happened, he had to stop thinking like this.

"It would have been best if you had ordered Krel to keep him chained in her own quarters, if she wanted to have him as a toy. I doubt that your desire for him would have grown in such a situation - especially since I know that your relationship with General Hux has been taking root."

The only thing to be ashamed of in front of his master was his weakness, and his lust for Hux did not feel weak like his want for Techie. Still, there was some tiny, foolish part of him left that cringed at the revelation that his master still knew about everything he was doing and feeling.

He would have thought he'd been used to it by now.

"And even if you had desired him, he would have degenerated into an animal in all but looks under Krel's 'care', and even if you had used him to satiate your lust, you likely wouldn't have found him any more pitiable or weakness-inducing than any whore of the Rim planets."

Of course his master was right. He was so right, and Kylo had been such a fool. If he had been wiser, it would not have played out like this. He would not have had to kill Techie.

But his master still hadn't ordered him to do so.

There was silence again as he stewed in his own stupidity, then Snoke spoke again.

"Return to the first reason why you were interested in him, my student. His strange resemblance to the General interests me also, and I would like to see what happens if you confront Hux with his strange little doppelganger. Either those events will give you the knowledge of what to do with him, or you will come to me again and I will give you that knowledge. But for now, let him keep out of the Knights' wing. If Krel wants to play with her toy, let her get him personally. And do not seek him out until you are ready to take him to Hux."

Kylo nodded slowly. Snoke was right; he had completely ignored his original reason for taking him with them. Making him a technician had been like putting a cat in a little engineer costume, when all he had wanted to do was to experiment on the cat's genealogy. And if he was really too weak to keep gentle feelings far from his heart if he was close to that pathetic, weak, pitiful boy, keeping him away would really be the best solution.

And once he found the solution to the riddle Techie posed, he would put him out of his misery.

~*~

The message that he was to keep away from the Knights’ wing until further notice came to him through his comm link, in the form of a message by Krel. He had received it when he was already at work, and after his horrible run-in with Kull, he had understood why it had to be like that. If she was still around there, he really rather didn’t want to walk those hallways, to tell the truth.

But it did confuse him that Kylo didn’t contact him in any way.

He knew that Kylo had his comm-ID, so he could have contacted him easy enough. He didn’t even have to come to him or anything; even though Techie had kind of secretly hoped that maybe after what had happened, there might be something more between them now than whatever there had been before. Their night together had been magical, even in the aftermath of Kull’s attack, and he had thought that Kylo would feel the same way… Or that he at least had thought the sex was good enough to repeat it.

But even more than a week later, he had still not heard from him. Krel had plucked him from his workplace in the evening twice to come with her to her rooms and bathe with her, but he had never seen even a glimpse of Kylo on his way through the Knight’s wing to Krel’s room, and afterwards, Krel had insisted on personally taking him back to his own room, which was not something she had ever done before. Maybe she was afraid of what would happen if he ran into Kull again… It was nice of her, really, but it also kept him from trying and visiting Kylo, which he thought he might have done if he had had the chance. Though of course, he couldn’t know if he really would have found the courage if that chance had presented itself to him. He didn’t know if Kylo wanted to see him, after all. And really, if Kylo did want to see him, he would have come to him by now, right?

Those thoughts and fears filled his nights, but at least during the day he managed to mostly distract himself from them. He had gotten a new assignment from Sizzly; the First Order needed a program for a droid that was supposed to override a security system that was very similar to the system Techie had set up around MaMa’s compound. The droid itself was being built on one of the First Order ships, but since Techie was familiar with the system, they had asked for his contribution to the software.

He had learned a ton while he was working with Sizzly, even though she wasn’t exactly a willing teacher. Eff was, though, and he’d spent most evenings he didn’t get called by Krel with her and her friends in the mess hall, listening to them talk about their work of the day, or about First Order produced holo films (which the higher ranking techs and servants of the temple could watch on screening devices, which usually led to a whole cluster of lower ranking techs and servants around them so they could watch too), and about social things like whether Jo should tell his coworker that she was preparing the chow for one of Lady Kashti’s monsters wrong, or at least in a far more complicated way than necessary, which appeared to be a big issue since she apparently was famously bad at taking criticism and Jo was extremely infatuated with her. Whenever Techie had any kind of question, be it about work or about anything going on in the Temple that did not concern the Knights, he’d get long, detailed and very helpful answers from everybody who had any idea about what he was talking about.

It was a new, strange kind of normal, and Techie really enjoyed it while it lasted.

But when he was alone in his room, his thoughts got dark again, and they inevitably returned to Kylo.

He’d gone over that night countless times in his head. Not over what had started all of it – he tried to keep those memories locked away, even though they still sometimes broke out of their locker and haunted him in his dreams, leaving him sweat-soaked and awake and again thinking about Kylo.

No matter how many time he replayed that night in his head, he didn’t understand why Kylo wasn’t contacting him anymore. Of course he had some suspicions – that it had been a one-time thing for Kylo, that he’d just been curious and that he’d now be sated was the one that he thought was the most likely. He dreaded to think that he had done something wrong. But maybe he had been coming on too strong – maybe Kylo would have liked it better if he’d not begged for him to fuck him, but if he’d been demure and sweet. But he also thought that Kylo would likely have left if his behavior hadn’t been what he’d expected. On the other hand, what if he’d just been horny and had his blood pumping from crashing that room and wanted to get it out somewhere? And Techie offered, so maybe he’d thought it’d be better than nothing?

He knew that Kylo couldn’t possibly desire him the way Techie desired Kylo. He couldn’t imagine that Kylo felt that stomach-tingling warmth whenever he saw him. But he had thought that he’d at least liked his body – that he’d at least liked the sex. He’d been so strange with the kisses and all, and Techie had thought that it was because maybe he thought Techie didn’t want to fuck him, that he’d been considerate when he’d run away after every kiss they shared, but now that Kylo knew that he’d be willing to go at any moment, why didn’t he come back? 

It was painful to think that Kylo might have been underwhelmed by his performance, or that he just had lost interest after he’d had him once. It was especially painful because that was the most likely reason why Techie hadn’t heard from him since that night.

So when he was told that he would accompany Kylo to the First Order ship Finalizer so Techie could install his program in the droid, he didn’t know whether to feel happy that he’d see Kylo again, or nervous because Kylo might not want to see him.

The night before they were supposed to fly to the Finalizer, Krel came to get him from the security room.

He had been done with the program for a while now, two days, really; but he was still working on it, trying to figure out whether there were any mistakes he had made and overlooked, whether there was any potential for unforeseen errors. He couldn’t stand the thought of embarrassing Kylo like that, and on a more selfish level, he didn’t want to learn what kind of punishment the First Order gave its technicians for failing an important assignment.

“Sizzly said you’re done,” Krel said as she pulled Techie away by his arm, gentle, but still very much not allowing for any objection. “It’s going to be perfectly fine, so stop that frown.” She squeezed his biceps in a strangely amicable fashion, then let go of him to lead the way through the maze of passages.

There was something different about her today, even though Techie couldn’t quite point out what.

She didn’t watch Techie undress this time, instead she showed an unusual interest in the mechanics of her own clothes. A tension was hanging over them, and Techie didn’t quite understand why. Was she worried about him going to the Finalizer? Did she think he might not come back? Were there plans, maybe, to leave him there? But there was still work in the Temple, and he still needed to finish at least three different programs and processes he had started under Sizzly’s supervision. If they wanted to transfer him, wouldn’t they at least tell him to get those done? There couldn’t be any reason to transfer him that could be so very urgent, right?

Except if, maybe, Kylo wanted to get rid of him. If that was the case, then Krel would definitely know. He felt himself swallow hard as he took off his underpants, and not because of the usual reason. Had he been so bad? Had he done anything to make Kylo feel so disgusted by him that he wanted to get rid of him for good? Was it because he had asked him to touch his…

“Come on,” Krel suddenly said, yanking him out of his thoughts. He walked towards the pools with her and waited for her to get in before he did so as well, letting her pose him on her lap like she wanted to have him.

At the end he was sitting next to her more than on her, with his legs over her lap and her head on his chest. She let her hands run over his legs, over the red hair on his shins that she still seemed to find fascinating. Techie managed to push his doubting thoughts aside and actually start relaxing into the warm water, but then suddenly he heard a sighing noise coming from his mistress.

He glanced down at her head, though he couldn’t see a lot of her face in the position they were in. Her fingers were still running over his leg, but he felt as if she had pulled her own legs up a little bit, as if she was curling herself in. It wasn’t something she had ever done before.

“Is…” he asked, then cleared his throat when he noticed that his voice was croaking. “Is anything wrong?”

Krel shrugged, but curled herself closer to his chest. “Not really, I guess,” she said, a strange, unsettlingly defeated tone in her voice. “Everything’s going according to plan…”

Techie found himself frowning; that didn’t sound good. Especially because he didn’t know what the ‘plan’ was.

He didn’t have to ask again – which he likely wouldn’t have done anyway – before Krel resumed talking.

“I like you, you know,” she said. “Not like… Like the Master likes you.” He could see at the top of her forehead that she was frowning as well now. “I guess it might be fun to see you squirm like that, but I like just being around you, having you here to cuddle and pet. I even like that I have somebody to defend against harebrained little bomb-heads like Kull. You’re still mine, even if everything that’s mine is also our Master’s, and the Order’s, but… I saw you first. I asked for you to be brought here.”

Her words sounded defiant, as if she was talking to somebody who was trying to take him away from her. Was that what she was thinking about his involvement with Kylo? But, first of all, their relationship was completely different from the relationship he had with Kylo, and second, he didn’t even know if he still even had a relationship with him.

“I’m yours, yes,” Techie said, trying to sound soothing despite his confusion and apprehension. “You…” He cleared his throat again. “You saved me. I know that. I’m really… really grateful.” Because it was true; she had saved him. If she hadn’t found him and thought that he was interesting enough – likely because he looked like this General they had been talking about quite a bit back then – he would have been blown up with the rest of the compound; or maybe he’d been killed by one of the Knights before that. In any case, he wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for Krel. She had saved his life; he had survived because of her, and surviving was, in the end, the only thing that was actually important.

And it really didn’t matter why Krel had saved him. It didn’t matter why his life had gone on after that day. It had. That was the important thing. And he really was grateful.

Krel didn’t answer right away, which was, once again, something she didn’t usually do. She had never struck Techie as particularly introspective. She usually talked when she had something to say and didn’t talk when there was nothing she wanted to say. But right now he felt as if there was something she wanted to tell him, something that was hanging in the air between them, on the steam of the hot spring they were sitting in.

Then suddenly her voice was in his head, and he felt her trepidation as if it was his own.

“I don’t think Kylo is always right, and he knows that,” she told him, as her hands gently ran over his thighs and his knee and down over the fuzz on his shins. “I want to keep you. I have to obey him, but… I don’t think he is right.”

Krel left his head, but other than usual a sharp headache stayed behind. Techie closed his eyes and rubbed his temples to get rid of it, but it stayed where it was for minutes, until it slowly started to fade.

With a last pat to his knee, Krel shoved his legs off her lap. “Go and get something to eat, and then go to bed right away,” she said, without looking at him, as she stood up and left the pool. “You’re going to need a good night’s sleep.”


	11. Chapter 11

Kylo hadn’t talked a word to him when they met in the shuttle port; he hadn’t even taken off his mask. Techie was too afraid to talk, and he thought that Kylo’s behavior pretty obviously showed that he wasn’t interested in anything he had to say anyway. They went into the shuttle, together with a service droid and the pilot. Techie sat down on a bench while Kylo kept standing behind the empty co-pilot’s seat. The shuttle took off, and soon Techie was too preoccupied trying to keep his nausea at bay to keep watching Kylo’s motionless back. His anxiety, both about meeting Kylo again and leaving the Temple to go to a First Order ship, even if temporary, had given him stomach troubles since that morning, and now that he was subjected to the still unfamiliar motions of the shuttle as they hurtled into space, he could hardly do anything but carefully concentrate on his breathing and stare at the wall in front of him. He closed his eyes as they went into hyperspace, hardly able to keep his breakfast down, even though he had only eaten two slices of carbs since he hadn’t felt too hot in the first place.

Finally they came out of hyperspace. Still trying to calm his breathing, Techie ventured a look out of the transparisteel window at the front of the shuttle. A ship bigger than anything he had ever seen was hanging in space before them. He remembered looking down up at the moon where MaMa’s compound had been when he had first been brought there, and he wondered if the ship he saw now wasn’t actually bigger, or at least longer, than that moon. As they drew nearer, it soon became impossible to see all of it, and as they finally docked, Techie was sure that they couldn’t be more significant than a flea on this juggernaut of a machine.

The door of the transport opened and Techie followed Kylo out into a bay filled with more people and more noise than he had seen since his last time on a slave market. There were armored soldiers everywhere, not in the light black armor they wore in the Temple, but in pristine white, carrying heavy weapons and marching together like the flocks of white birds swimming on the pond back by his first master’s house. There were techs in similar outfits as him everywhere, though most of them were wearing caps instead of goggles, and the insignia on their uniforms was different. He could see what he thought were pilots, people with strange helmets followed by astromechs who were swarming around vessels of different sizes, and people who seemed to neither be pilots or techs, but still wore black and walked with a kind of authority that made Techie shrink internally by pure instinct.

The droid was beeping along behind them as Kylo led them out of the bay into a wide, high hallway. Kylo didn’t stop to tell Techie where they were going next, but Techie didn’t ask; even if he had still been on good terms with him, he wouldn’t have dared talking directly to somebody as far higher up than him as Kylo in a place as crowded as this. He didn’t know exactly where he was in the hierarchy of this place, as a technician who did not belong to the ship’s crew, but his astute, well-trained sense for propriety and obedience made it clear to him that hardly anybody would notice him as long as he kept his head down – especially since everybody seemed to go out of their way to, well, get out of Kylo’s way.

It was strange to walk through straight hallways again after weeks of always correcting just a little to not walk into one of the curved walls of the Temple. Techie tried to concentrate on that; keeping his head down and walking straight. He hardly looked around himself, only kept his eyes fixed to the heels of Kylo’s boots, though he did listen attentively to the din around him, the steps of boots, the chatter, the gentle beeping of the droid following him.

They took an elevator and walked down another hallway, as busy as the first one. Suddenly Kylo stopped in front of a door, and before he even touched it, the door flew open and a technician came out.

“Lord Ren,” the technician said, immediately taking on some kind of parade position with his back ridiculously straight and his hands behind his back. Techie could hear terror in his voice, and his face looked unnaturally pale.

He was so occupied looking at the startled technician that he needed a beat to notice Kylo’s hand gesturing for him to step forward. He did so immediately, lowering his eyes so the other man wouldn’t notice that he’d looked at his face.

“I will return here in two hours. I expect a preliminary report then; your full report goes to General Hux.”

The technician saluted, then Kylo turned around and walked away, once again cutting a swath through the crowd.

The service droid behind him beeped again, and the technician in front of him cleared his throat. “Alright, let’s-“

Techie had looked up just for a second to judge the other man’s mood, and he realized that his eyes had made that little whirring sound that he already didn’t really hear anymore, but that still irritated a few people he’d been working with. Sizzly had never said anything, and neither had any of the Knights, so he had kind of forgotten about it, but the way the technician suddenly broke off when he heard the whirring immediately sent a cold chill down his spine. He looked up, an apology on his lips, but when he saw the look in the other man’s eyes the words died. He immediately knew that he’d made a mistake. The man was now not just hearing, but seeing his eyes.

The sneer on his face was different from the confused, surprised look that many of the other technicians in the Temple had given him. Uglier. Disdainful. Even if Techie wasn’t part of this crew, he reckoned that the other technician had a higher rank than him – after all, as far as he knew he was the one responsible for this project. And unlike in the temple, nobody here knew that he was the, well, ‘favorite’ of a Knight of Ren, be it Krel or Kylo. Even though it was more of a ‘had been’ in Kylo’s case. Still, he had always felt a little bit saver around new people in the Temple, knowing that everybody knew that Krel considered him her personal property. He wasn’t easily replaceable back at the Temple.

Here, though, his biotic eyes marked him as ‘unnatural’, like some of the men back at MaMa’s compound had said. Being faced with somebody who might actually think that his eyes made him less than human, judging from that look in his eyes… He just didn’t know what to do. He was scared. And as his gaze darted from the man in front of him to the droid at his side, as if the robot would know what to do, his eyes whirred again, loud as a thunderstorm in Techie’s fraught mind.

The technician turned around and started walking without as much as a ‘Come’. Techie still followed him, and tried to keep his eyes down, and as quiet as possible.

~*~

The tech led him to the workshop where the splicer droid was waiting for his program. The other technicians around them didn’t talk to him, but he could still hear their whispers and feel their looks as he plugged his interfacing screen and the Temple droid into the splicer and started installing his software. At least the droids didn’t care whether he had real eyes or not. Their whirring and beeping managed to let some of his nervousness vanish, at least so far that his work didn’t get impacted. He desperately tried to completely sink into his work, to get into the flow that usually set in when he was sitting with his fingers on a keyboard. But he just couldn’t get his thoughts to quit reminding him that it was a really bad sign if he got along better with droids than with humans, that it might be true that he was more droid than human, that it was definitely true that he wasn’t a complete human, that he was just a broken toy with some useful functions…

He really wished his brain wouldn’t do this, but he still managed to get through the whirlwind of his self-doubts to get everything installed, then he let his failsave programs run through the droid’s programming to make sure he hadn’t messed anything up. After he had gotten that done, he spent the time until he’d be brought back to Kylo by manually looking through the program he had installed, making sure that all components were there once more, even though at this point that was more of an idle exercise than really necessary. But there wasn’t really anything else he could do with the remaining time; he definitely wouldn’t make small talk with the other techs, who had now returned to their own work, and he definitely didn’t want to just sit around doing nothing like some droid on standby.

When the technician who had brought him here came to him again, clearing his throat instead of actually saying anything to get his attention, Techie handed over the data chip with the relevant documentation of his program and then, together with the droid who had accompanied him, followed him out of the room and back up the corridor they had walked through earlier.

Kylo wasn’t there yet. The technician kept looking at his comm for the time, fidgeting more the longer they waited. Techie was pretty sure that he’d just let him wait on his own if it hadn’t been Kylo Ren who was going to get him, but he could understand that the other man didn’t want to show any kind of disrespect towards somebody like the Master of the Knights of Ren. For a moment he wondered what the people on this ship thought about Master Kylo. With all the gleaming chrome and the white armor and the pressed dark grey uniforms, Kylo seemed to be out of place, far more so than he ever was in the Temple, where everybody wore black and the walls were painted with creatures and landscapes just as otherworldly as the Knights. Techie had only been away for a few hours, but he already missed it. He had to cross his arms in front of his chest to not start fidgeting too.

A sudden hush around them made Techie’s heart beat faster, even before he realized what the hush meant. He looked up and saw the imposing figure of Master Kylo coming down the corridor towards them, his long steps making his black cape sway around his impressing body.

It gave him a little thrill to see the other technician straighten and his face twisting just slightly in fear. He was still afraid of Kylo too, of course, but just the fact that he knew him at least enough not to shrink in fear at his presence, that Kylo personally took care of him now, instead of just having him brought back to the shuttle by somebody from the Finalizer crew, made him feel strong. He was still insecure about the way Kylo had stopped communicating with him after they had fucked, but even if he was no longer interested in him in that way, Kylo at least seemed to still see him as an asset. And honestly, that would be enough. He knew that he would be hurting for a while to come, because his stupid romantic feelings had been hurt, but that wasn’t Kylo’s fault. He had invited Kylo to fuck him, and Kylo had done him that incredible favor, and there was really no more he could ask of him.

Kylo stopped in front of them and immediately asked the technician for his preliminary; Techie gave his own report with as soft a voice as he could get away with, and then Kylo nodded to the technician and turned around, motioning to Techie and the droid that was still with them to follow him.

They walked back to the elevator, but this time they went up, instead of down. Techie had been sure that the docking stations where at a lower level – but maybe Kylo wanted to get something else done before they would go back to the shuttle. Techie had been told he’d be back again ‘soon’ and that he was only going to be on the Finalizer to install the software, but that didn’t mean that he would be brought back right away, now that he thought about it. Maybe he’d have to spend some days on this ship, he thought, dread rising in his stomach. It would likely be more convenient for Kylo, too. There had to be a lot of things he had to get done, after all.

He cast a sideways glance towards the Knight standing next to him. Of course he couldn’t read anything on his face, not when he was wearing his mask; but he wished he could have seen his face, maybe even looked in his eyes…

Now it was getting away from him again. He wouldn’t have looked in Kylo’s eyes here even if he hadn’t been wearing the mask. He had to stop those stupid thoughts, really. It was disrespectful towards Kylo, and Techie knew that he owed Kylo his respect more than anything else.

The level they emerged at wasn’t any less busy than the one they had just been on, but the people running around here weren’t techs, as far as Techie could tell. They were working on holo- and datapads, talking with each other in hushed, but important sounding voices, rushing from one hallway to another followed by messenger droids. Kylo’s presence was once again noted with a general hush, though these people seemed just a little less afraid of him than the ones in the lower levels; still afraid, just not absolutely paralyzed like some of the technicians had been.

They stopped in front of an important looking door with a sign reading ‘Conference Room 3’ next to it. For a moment he wondered what they were doing in a conference room, but then Kylo already opened the door and walked into the room, once again motioning him to follow with a wave of his hand.

The room was fairly non-descript, basically like the meeting room in the Temple, just more chrome than black; but Techie didn’t have a lot of time actually looking around, since his attention was nearly immediately drawn to the group of people standing at the far end of the large table that took in the largest part of the room. Two of them looked basically like the people on the corridor outside; slick charcoal uniforms, slicked back hair, slick faces that didn’t betray even a trace of emotion. They were standing around a third man, bent over a datapad, and had likely been talking before Kylo had entered; now they looked up at him, and immediately straightened.

Only the man in the middle stayed bent over, still intent on the datapad in front of him, though Techie had the impression that his shoulders had slightly tensed up for just a second before they relaxed again. Nobody said anything while that man, who was a redhead like Techie, kept his attention on his work.

Several moments passed, and Techie’s palms where already sweating with the tension that seemed to fill the room, an invisible play of power that he didn’t quite understand but could recognize from many incidents he had survived at MaMa’s complex, until the man finally looked up.

“Do you need anything, Ren?”

He had a hard face, with lips so pale that they were nearly purple, and a strong chin. He was a handsome man, but something about him confused Techie. Something about his eyes… He felt as if he had seen those eyes before.

Kylo waited for a moment before he answered. “I brought somebody who might interest you, General.”

Sudden panic welled up inside of Techie at those words. What? Why would he bring him to this man? Did he want to get rid of him? Give him away? His gaze darted from the man, who was looking at him with just a hint confusion on his schooled face, back to Kylo, then back to the man – and stopped dead when he saw the confusion give way to shock, and then anger. That was one expression he would have recognized anywhere, and on anybody.

“Officers, please leave. I need to have word with Ren,” he told the two people around him, without taking his eyes off Techie. The panic sunk into his stomach. He felt as if he was about to vomit.

The two officers left, after casting curious glances in their direction.

And then Techie was alone in a room with two men whose power he could hardly fathom; and one of them was looking at him as if he had just scratched him from the sole of his boot.

The General was still looking at him from the other end of the table; but soon he walked around it, his steps fast and hard, and stopped to tower in front of him. Those green eyes that seemed so eerily familiar to him bore into his own for just a second, before he managed to yank his gaze away and look to the floor. That, however, seemed to irate the other man even more, and a hand grabbed his hair and pulled it back to make him look up.

The man pulled his head to this side and that, looking at his face, his ears, before he finally let go and grabbed his hand. He yanked his glove off, then he pulled his sleeve up and looked at his wrist; and to Techie’s utter surprise, he yanked his own sleeve up as well and held his wrist next to Techie’s. Before Techie could understand what exactly was going on, the General let out a curse in a language he didn’t understand and pulled back, letting go of him.

“Where did you find him?” he hissed at Kylo, and Techie was surprised that he was apparently keeping his voice low. “How long have you had him? And why is he wearing this… This uniform?!”

A click came from Kylo’s direction, and Techie frantically turned his head to see Kylo taking off his helmet.

“So I assume you know who he is?” Kylo asked, and ice cold water poured through Techie’s veins. Who he was? How would this man know him? He was just some slave who had become a servant of the Temple, he was nothing, how would that man – the General – ever-

“Of course I know who he is,” the General snapped, and then he looked at him again. “Even in such a pitiful state, I would always recognize _myself_.”

“Yourself?” Kylo sounded confused, but Techie hardly understood what he was saying. Those eyes. He knew those eyes. Those had been his eyes. Before… before MaMa. But how…

The General didn’t answer right away. He gnashed his teeth together with an audible click, then he turned around and went to the other side of the room; then he turned around and came back, one hand on his head, tousling his perfect hair as he pulled at it. His face was contorted with anger.

“I knew I should have done it myself… I knew she wouldn’t have the guts… Fucking Brendol and his fucking idiotic…”

He was muttering, but nothing he was saying was making any sense to Techie. Nothing was making sense anymore. Why had he had the same eyes as this man? Why did he say he would always recognize ‘himself’? What in the world was going on?

The General paced the length of the room another time, but this time when he came back, Kylo stepped forward and grabbed his arm.

“Hux. Tell me what is going on.”

Hux – General Hux? The one the Knights had said he looked like?

The red-haired man seemed to contemplate fighting at first, but then he just snarled at Kylo. “Let go of my arm, Ren.”

Kylo did as he was told, but he didn’t step back; he was still in the General’s space, partially obscuring him from Techie.

Hux made half a step back, then he pointed at Techie, snarl still on his face.

“That… _thing_ over there. That is _my_ clone. Brendol had him produced when I was fifteen, as a ‘safety measure’.”

Suddenly, every part of Techie was freezing cold. Something changed inside of him; he could feel a part of himself turning, dying, dissolved in those words as if in acid. He suddenly understood why he had looked at his wrist. He looked down himself, and saw a constellation of four birth marks. The General likely had the exact same pattern on his own wrist.

The General kept talking.

“I found out about him when I was 17. I found the place where Brendol was stashing him and the woman who had carried him to term. He wasn’t even a perfect copy.” His eyes had turned to ice, and he looked at Techie with obvious disgust. “He was seriously deficient. I told her to get rid of him; I went back a few weeks later and he was gone.” His voice sounded pressed, as if he was speaking through clenched teeth, but every single one of his words was bright and clear and horrible in Techie’s ears. “I was an idiot, of course. I should have killed him when I had the chance. Obviously she didn’t do what I told her.”

Hux looked at him again, pure hatred in his eyes, and Techie stepped backwards until he felt the wall in his back. He hugged his arms around his chest as if to protect himself from a sudden attack.

“Later, I figured out that it might not have been the worst idea to keep him around until he was grown,” Hux continued, but now he turned around again and started pacing. “There would have been no way for him to replace me once I had… once Brendol was gone, but sometimes I thought it would have been quite useful to have a repository of exact copies of my organs.” He looked him up and down, and Techie wished with all his heart to just melt into the wall behind him. “He looks like shit. I can’t imagine his organs are useful anymore.”

The General looked back at Kylo, his thick eyebrows drawn into a sharp frown. “Get rid of him. I don’t care where you got him from; he is genetic trash. It is a disgrace that he is still alive.”

‘Get rid of him’. Something inside of him was tumbling, as if a part of what had held him together had broken apart and was about to fall. Not only did those words cause him unspeakable terror, but he had heard them before; he didn’t know when, he didn’t know how, but something in his memory stirred … Was it possible that a part of him remembered the day when this man… General Hux… The man whose clone he was… had told his… his mother to take him away? There was something… Just beyond his reach…

But then a voice at the back of his mind screamed at him that this wasn’t the time to go looking for ancient memories, not when he was standing here with the General telling Kylo to _kill him_ , because it was a _disgrace_ that he was still alive. A whimper forced its way out of his throat, and he pulled his shoulders up to his head, trying to make himself as small as possible without actually curling up into a ball. He didn’t want to die – that was the one thing he had always known, the one thing that had kept him from ending it all those times he would have had a chance. The one thing that kept him from speaking out and saving Orny. The one thing that had made him give his all to master the security technology MaMa wanted him to master.

He suddenly realized that this was the reason why he had been spared death in MaMa’s compound. Because he looked like this man in front of him. Because he was a clone. A clone. A copy, and a bad one too.

Had he been spared death just to die now that they had found out why he looked like the General?

Kylo hadn’t answered for some moments, but now he took his helmet and made to put it back on. “I need to report to the Supreme Leader. If he agrees with your assessment, I will dispose of your… clone.”

Hux did not look happy, but he just gave a stiff nod. “I hope you know that this information must remain highly classified,” he pressed out.

Kylo nodded. “Of course.” Then he put his helmet back on and motioned Techie to follow him out of the room.

He could feel the General’s eyes burying into the back of his head as he left.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo I hope all of you read the tags...

Not a single word passed between them. Neither on the way to the shuttle, nor during the shuttle flight. There was nothing left to say. Techie had lost his usefulness. The question that had prolonged his life had been answered. There was no reason for him to live now.

And so, there was no reason for Kylo to acknowledge him anymore.

Even though he did not speak a word with him, Kylo still brought him back to his room. But when Techie entered and turned around, to maybe at least get some kind of reaction about what had happened from Kylo, the Knight just closed the door. A red light above it marked it as locked just a moment later.

Techie waited for a few seconds, until he thought that Kylo would have gone, then he tried to open the door. But his hand on the touch-lock only caused an offended beep, so he drew his hand back and sat down on his bed, just where it met the corner of the room. He pulled his knees to his chest without taking off his shoes, dragging dust onto the crisp, clean grey pillow. He didn't have it in him to care; who knew if he'd even get the opportunity to use that pillow again.

General Hux wanted him dead; and Kylo had said that he would have to first talk with the Supreme Leader about this. What the Supreme Leader, who he had only heard talked about in whispers before among the servants and technicians, had to do with any of that, he did not know. He could imagine that he might be kept alive as some kind of blackmail material - but why would the First Order need to blackmail its own General?

And apart from that, there was really no reason why he should stay alive. He was fairly sure that the General outranked Krel - he had not shown Kylo any of the deference the other Knights showed him - and Krel would likely be the only person who would at least be a little sad about his death. He could not imagine that it would affect her too much, but she had said that she liked him, so he didn't think it was too much to hope that she would at least be upset when he died.

In all of his misery, that was a nice thought. Since the incidence with Orny, there had never really been anybody in his life who would have mourned his death. MaMa would maybe have seen it as a waste, but not as a tragedy; and none of the men and women who had made awkward acquaintances or nightly distractions of him would have given more than a 'Well, that sucks', if even that.

He wondered if Eff would miss him.

If his death had been ordered by the Supreme Leader himself, he was rather sure that the people here he had considered something like friends would not talk about him ever again. When MaMa had killed somebody, nobody had talked about them ever again either.

He was going to die. He had finally lost his last use. Useless slaves did not get to live, that had always been a reality in his life. And he was worse than useless. His very existence was offensive to a man who was more powerful than Techie, in his limited experience of formal power structures, could really imagine.

He was going to die, because he was a copy of somebody in power. Because for some unfathomable reason, his existence threatened somebody so far away from Techie's lived reality that he couldn't even fathom that they should actually have the same... the same what, the same genes? Was that how clones where made? All he knew about clones was from the stories the older servants had told back at his first master's place. Apparently there had been an army of clones ones, all made from the genes of the same man. Since they had been clones, they had been perfect soldiers; nobody would ever care how many of them died. After all, they weren't real people. They were just a step up from droids.

He looked down at his sleeve, then pulled it up with similar roughness as Hux had done. He looked at the small, brown spots on his wrist. There was somebody else who saw the same exact spots when he looked down. But that person's hands were clothed in expensive leather, they weren't dry and discolored like his. There was somebody whose brain was made of the exact same parts as his. The only reason why he had even been born was, what had the General said, to serve as an 'insurance policy'? What did that even mean? The General had said that he only later thought that he could have harvested his organs, so that couldn't have been his original purpose. He had been made by his father, he said... Why would anybody make an exact copy of his only child?

To have a backup maybe, like in a computer program? To have a security copy if the code was lost? Or to replace that first set of code if any error found its way into it, and to start again, so you could avoid the error this time around?

A shudder ran through Techie's body, and suddenly he felt nauseous. He could understand why Hux would hate him if that was what he had been born for. If he had been born to replace another person, and that person was still alive, still well, then he had no purpose at all, did he? Oh, he knew the fear of being replaced, he knew that fear far too well. He had always been replacable. For a slave, that was just par for the course. But a powerful general? He could imagine that just the thought he could be replaced by a creature as wretched as him would make him furious.

He had every right to be furious.

Techie should have died when he was a child, just like General Hux had wanted.

He was living in a body that didn't belong to him, and in more ways than just because of his unfreeness. This wasn't _his_ body. It was that of General Hux. He had no body of his own. He had no life of his own. He was just a copy, a backup that should have been deleted long ago...

Never since Orny's death had he wanted to cry as badly as now. Back then, he had been able to hide in a storage room and just let the tears come until they stopped, but now... He closed his eyes, felt the unnatural feeling of his eyelids sliding over the synthetic material of his eyeballs. This was wrong. Everything was wrong. He wanted his eyes back. He wanted his tears back. It hadn't been his fault that he hadn't been able to stay awake for days on end. Nobody would have been able to do that. He didn't deserve these eyes. He didn't deserve to be this way, to be so horribly wrong. He deserved death, yes, but he didn't deserve this disfigurement. This body had been valuable, once. His eyes had been so beautiful. As beautiful as those of the General. Even if they had never been really his, just like no part of his body had ever been really his, he deserved to see the world through those eyes. He didn't deserve the constant pain and the disgusted looks his eyes brought him. He didn't deserve not to be able to cry to mourn his own death.

He put the middle and index finger of both of his hands against his eyelids. He could feel how hard his bionics were, he could hear them whirring behind his lids. He had never hated anything so much as that noise. He opened his lids and touched his fingers against his eyes, just the very tips, so gently that he didn't even feel anything. But then he touched them harder, and he still didn't feel anything except for a very slight pressure at the back of his eyes, where they were plugged into him like a droid's connector to a data pad. He crooked his fingers and pushed his nails against his eyes. Nothing happened. There was no pain. No nothing. Not the smallest tear.

Anger welled up in him. This wasn’t right. He should be hurting – it should be hurting to touch his eyes. His real eyes would have hurt. He would never have been able to do this if he was still real, if he was still _him_. His eyes whirred disgustingly when he pushed his thumbs into the outer corners of his eyes. They needed to get out, out out out. He couldn’t live with them. He couldn’t live a moment longer with that horrible pain, with that horrible _noise_.

His thumbs slid into the warmth of his flesh. His infected tissue protested, it finally hurt, and he pushed his middle fingers into the inner corners, and then he pushed farther, and then he _grabbed_ and _yanked_.

Pain exploded in his head. He felt wetness running down his cheeks.

Then he didn’t feel anything anymore.


	13. Chapter 13

The last thing he had felt was pain. The next thing he felt was a blanket over his body, and a strange, slightly nauseating feeling that seemed to run from his head down to his stomach. There was beeping around him, two kinds of beeping, one regular and one very obviously from a droid, irregular and excited. He sighed lowly to let go of some of the pressure in his chest, and as he breathed in again, he noticed the smells of bleach and iron.

Everything around him was darkness.

“He’s awake,” a voice next to him said – Krel, with a strange rough edge to her voice. She was next to him, he thought, and he was proven right when something touched his hand through the blanket. A small hand, which he knew so well from bathing with her.

On the other side of him, there was some clanking and rustling, and then the rhythm of the regular beeping stopped.

“Techie?” said a voice he didn’t recognize for a moment. “You’re in the medical tract. Please don’t move your head. You should be able to talk, though. Can you try saying ‘Yes’?”

The medic. He remembered her. Had his last visit here really been on the same day that the complex had been destroyed? His memories seemed disjoined, like bubbles floating in the air, never really touching.

His mouth was horribly dry. He tried to swallow once, twice, then he opened his mouth and pushed out a little, croaky “Yes.”

“Good.” She touched something on his other arm, which seemed to be above the blanket, because he could feel the warmth of her hand on his skin. There was a small bit of pressure, and suddenly he noticed that there was something stuck in his arm. “Just a little needle, don’t worry about it. You are on painkillers right now. I had to repair the ends of your optic nerves where the bionics ripped, and I did some work on the rest of your eye socket. Cut out the remnants of some infected areas and removed other damaged tissue. I treated your sockets with bacta, and now there are glass orbs in there to keep them from collapsing.”

Her voice sounded matter-of-fact, and it contrasted strangely to the way the hand on his other arm, Krel’s hand, squeezed his biceps with a clumsy kind of gentleness.

“You’re going to get a new pair of bionics,” Krel murmured to his right. “Sizzly is making them, they’re going to be a lot better than your old ones…”

Why wasn’t she asking what he had been thinking? Why wasn’t she yelling at him? He had done something incredibly stupid; he had hurt himself, he had damaged himself without even asking for permission. He had wanted to end everything, to stop seeing and to stop being. If he couldn’t see the world around him, it wasn’t there.

But now he couldn’t see, and he was still here. Everything around him was still there.

“Okay,” he answered, his voice still rough. He didn’t know if he wanted new bionics; the darkness was scary, but it was calming, too.

Making new bionics was likely a waste anyway. He wondered when Kylo would come to do what the General had asked him to…

Krel’s grip on his arm became firmer. “You should sleep some more, so you will heal faster,” she murmured.

He nodded slightly. He did still feel very tired, as if all of his battery life had been drained and he was hanging on by half a percent.

“I’ll come back to visit you again later,” Krel said, then the hand left his arm and he heard steps retreating.

~*~

“Master Kylo.”

Kylo turned around and lowered his lightsaber. This time he hadn’t been fighting training droids, just gone through his motions, again and again and again until his clothes were drenched in sweat.

Krel was standing at the entrance of the training hall, in her usual Knights’ robes, making it clear instantly that she wasn’t here to train.

“Krel,” Kylo greeted her.

“Don’t kill the boy,” she said, without any further ado.

Kylo frowned; he had heard what had happened with Techie’s eyes, and he had been procrastinating his visit to Snoke, but he knew that he had to see his master again, and he was sure that he would tell him to make away with the boy who gave him so much trouble.

“So it’s true,” Kylo said, taking a towel from a rack and drying his sweat-soaked face. “You did get sentimental. I shouldn’t have allowed you to take him with us in the first place.”

“Sentimental,” Krel said, the slightest tick of her face muscles showing the sneer she was holding back. “Is that what you fear you are becoming? You must not forget our mindlink, Master. All of us know that you are afraid of the weakness he makes you feel.”

“And you must not forget your rank, Krel,” he shot back, anger swelling inside of him. Krel had never talked with him like that, not even before he had become Master of the Knights of Ren. She really must have fallen for that pathetic little creature. What was it about Techie that seemed to make the powerful so weak?

“I am acting as your counsel, Master,” Krel said, her eyes hard on Kylo’s, her voice forcefully calm. “You are letting a slave rile you up and decide your actions. A boy with no power and not the slightest bit of ambition. He hasn’t even done anything to make you weak; just his mere presence and his looks have made you behave so disgracefully.”

Kylo stiffened. “Be careful of the words you use to describe your Master, Krel.”

But the Chagrian just pushed her chin out. He was sure he could see a tiny movement of her jaw where she was trying to keep her tongue from flitting out.

“Eliminating him will not eliminate that weakness you are so afraid of, Master,” she said. “There will be another one who makes you weak, and the next time it might not be somebody as powerless and docile as Techie. What if the General decides to use that devotion you are developing for him against you? What if there will be another, somebody who might be an actual threat, and who taps into that same weakness of yours? You can kill Techie now because of how powerless he is; but that weakness won’t go away, Master. It’s not Techie that’s making you weak. It is a part of you. And killing him won’t kill that.”

Kylo felt his blood boiling. Krel was calling him weak, and he absolutely did not appreciate it. But on the other hand, she just echoed his own thoughts; after all, she was able to hear most of them, just as he knew the thoughts of his Knights. So he didn’t answer. He turned around, so he wouldn’t have to look at her face, and moved towards the door that would lead him to the ‘fresher.

“You can’t kill that part of you by killing the boy, Master,” Krel called after him. “But you could try to confront what makes you weak, and stay strong despite it. Don’t give in to short-sighted fear. The only risk in keeping Techie alive is that you find out your weakness is stronger than you. Kill him, and you would just get to ignore that weakness until it becomes fatal.”

He slammed the door shut behind him, and for a second he waited, until he heard receding steps. Then, as his anger finally became too much to keep inside of him, he let out a roar and punched his fist against the wall of the ‘fresher hard enough to make his hand sting and a crack appear on the wall where his outburst had concentrated the Force around his fist.

It would be easy to kill Techie, yes. It would be easy because he wouldn’t fight; it would be like turning a rabbit’s neck. But it would also be hard, looking down at him and knowing that he was going to end that life, that he was going to make that soft face that had tugged at parts of him that he didn’t want to exist go blank forever. Was it weakness to eradicate a threat to his very being, no matter how weak this threat was physically?

It did seem like the easy option, though. It would be harder to keep him alive and try to make himself forget about him. Fighting against the light inside of him, instead of just destroying what made him feel its pull. If he managed to defeat the threat inside of him this time, he would be able to do so again if, like Krel had said, a stronger opponent would come and stick their hand in that same wound.

Techie was easy to get rid of. But his training, his path on the Dark Side had never been ‘easy’. Meditation wasn’t easy; starving himself was not easy. His relentless, continuous physical training had never been easy.

If it was easy, he would never have gotten as strong as he was now.

What if this was the essence of this new test to his devotion to the Dark Side? He could succumb, of course; he could let his feelings get the better of him and become a thrall to the tenderness he felt for Techie. He could kill Techie, and get rid of the threat; but that would be a short cut, the easy way out; he would not get stronger, because he would refuse to stand the test in the first place. If he kept him alive, and if he kept knowing that he was around, and if he was able to find a way to not care, to defeat the tenderness and the worries and any feelings he had for Techie… Would that be victory?

Or was this some twisted way in which the Light was trying to lure him? Make him believe it was the right decision to keep Techie alive, but in reality, he only thought so because of his own weakness?

Would Darth Vader have hesitated to kill somebody who made him weak?

Would Darth Vader ever let himself be made weak in the first place?

If he killed Techie, he was giving in to his weakness by taking the easy way, refusing to confront his weakness, right? But if he didn’t kill him, he was giving in to his weakness just as much, because that weak part inside of him wanted to keep him alive…

He turned the water on as hot as it would go. He had to meditate on this.

~*~

Shrouded in darkness as he was, Techie could not tell how much time had passed since he had been brought to the medical tract. He couldn’t tell how long he had been passed out before he’d woken up that first time in total darkness, and he couldn’t tell how long he slept when the waking blackness turned to sinister dreams, dreams filled with fire, with reflections of MaMa’s scarred face in the screens of giant computers, with the racket of a room being destroyed just beyond a closet door. He woke up with his heart hammering against his chest, confused and disoriented because he couldn’t see, even if he opened his eyes – until he remembered what he had done, and that the things in his eye sockets weren’t his ill-fitting but functional bionics, but just spheres of glass that served no other purpose but to keep his sockets from collapsing.

Judging from the food they brought him, ration bars that he could eat without any significant problems, he had likely been here for just more than a day. He had fallen asleep again and again, because his body had been horribly exhausted from what he had done to it, and now not only did he feel misplaced in space, but also in time; how could it have been not even two days since he had come here? It felt like he’d spent weeks in this darkness.

Krel had come and gone once more. She hadn’t talked to him, just sat next to him for a while and touched his hand fleetingly just before she’d stood up again. But she had talked with the medic, far enough away that he had to strain a little to hear them. Krel had asked how long the new bionics would take to be finished, and how his eyes were healing. The medic said that the eyes would be done by tomorrow, though she also said that there was a little bit of a problem with his optic nerves; they had been connected to the bionics in a way so sloppy that she was surprised they had even kept working for so long, and now it would be a little harder to connect them to his new eyes.

Techie didn’t feel a lot about those words, not even fear. He wasn’t waiting for his new bionics to get done; he was waiting for Kylo to come back and do what Hux had asked him to do. The darkness was lulling his mind into a comfortable stupor; the thought of never having to get out of this bed for the rest of his life was becoming more appealing by the hour.


	14. Chapter 14

He had been lying awake for a long time, though he had no way to know how long, when the door opened and his stomach turned around with dread. He knew Kylo from his steps, even before the medic muttered ‘Lord Ren’ in greeting. Icy cold ran through his body, from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, and made him shiver under his blanket. He heard the steps coming closer. His heart was beating louder, his breath was coming faster, as if his body was trying to get every part of him filled with oxygen for what might be the last time. When Kylo’s steps ceased next to his bed, he felt sick to his stomach.

Krel wasn’t here to protect him, and he knew that even she would have been powerless. She couldn‘t protect him. Nobody could protect him from Kylo. Nobody could keep him from dying at Kylo‘s hand.

Suddenly he felt the ugly pressure of despair squeeze his chest, as if somebody had put an entire starship on him. The darkness around him was vibrating with his fear. He heard a low rasping noise, and then the press of a button and the unmistakable sound of Kylo‘s light sword being turned on.

He didn‘t want to die.

The insight came out of nowhere. He had thought he was ready to die; he had thought the darkness he had plunged himself into had prepared him.

He had given up on everything.

But now suddenly he realized that there was no such thing as „giving up“, not as long as he was breathing. No matter how dark the planes of his mind seemed to be, how hopeless his future - he had lived through darkness, and he had lived through hopelessness, and there had always been something afterwards. He had survived so much. And there were good things here, things he didn’t want to never experience again. His work. Sizzly, and Ell. He didn’t want to never see the two of them again, and he didn’t want to never see Lady Krel again.

He didn‘t want to die in an infirmary, with glass eyes in his head, killed by the same hands that had held him so tenderly.

„Please“, he whispered. His voice sounded raw. He hadn‘t used it since he had woken up in darkness for the first time just two days ago. „Please,“ he repeated, and he could hear the fear in his voice, the shivering, the utter terror. „I don‘t want to die… Please, Master, my Lord, I don‘t want to die!“

He was sobbing now, ugly dry sobs that were shaking his body and contorting his face. „Please“, he cried out as loud as he could. He had always tried to be as quiet as possible, to never get noticed by anybody. He hadn’t been this loud since the day MaMa had done what she had done. But now he needed to be heard. He needed Kylo to hear him. „Please don‘t ki- don‘t kill me!“

There was a low noise, the swishing of the sword, he thought, and he held his breath, his whole body convulsing with the effort of controlling his shivering.

The push of a button again, and then another noise. The light sword had been shut off.

„Pathetic,“ he heard Kylo‘s low voice say. It was dripping with disgust.

Then there were steps. Retreating steps.

The door of the medical tract slid open. Then it slid shut.

And he was still alive.

New sobs started shaking him, sobs that came with cries full of all the desperation he had masked behind indifference for two days.

He had screamed his throat raw before the medic had a chance to walk over and push the needle of a syringe into his arm.

He fell asleep just moments later.

~*~  
It was a strange thing, to wake up with the dryness in his mouth and the dull ache in his head from being given tranqs, to feel like absolute shit with his whole body hurting from lying in the same position for too long, and to be as happy as he had never been before.

He was still alive. For whatever reason, by whatever miracle, he was still alive. Kylo had not killed him. And if he hadn’t taken this perfect opportunity, why would he take another? He couldn’t imagine that Kylo was the kind of person who would change his mind on something like this.

“Is anybody around?” he asked into the darkness, with his voice even more scratchy than before and his throat burning from all the sobbing he had done.

A beeping next to him answered, and then he heard the noise of wheels retreating. The medical service droid, he thought. A warm feeling spread in his chest at the thought that he might have been standing next to him, watching over him as he slept. Footsteps approached quickly after, and the voice of the medic made his heart jump with joy at being able to hear another person talk.

“Seems like you are up? Three Three Eight says you asked for assistance. Are you experiencing any pain?”

He wet his dry lips. “No, not that… Could you… could you maybe… I don’t know if it’s possible…”

He could hear the medic lifting her eyebrows in her very words. “Now, if you want something, you will have to tell me what it is, only then will I be able to tell you if it is possible.”

Techie gulped down the little saliva he was able to produce. “Would it be possible to call Lady Krel and maybe… maybe ask her if she’d… Come here?”

There was a second of silence, and then he heard the low peeping of a communication device.

“Lady Krel, this is Chief Medical Officer Eroa. Your technician is asking if you could visit the medical tract at your convenience.”

He couldn’t quite make out the answer, but when the little disconnection click came, the medic – CMO Eroa, apparently – immediately told him that yes, she would come by immediately.

“Thank you,” he said, and he felt a smile spread his dry lips, He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t wait to have her here, even if he still couldn’t see her.  
~*~

He could tell that Krel had come to the medical wing by the sound of her steps. She was light in her leather boots, and the way she walked had a rhythm he was starting to think of as characteristic for her.

Even before she had addressed him, he reached out a hand to her.

“He didn’t do it,” he said, a shiver of joy in his voice. “He didn’t do it, my lady. I’m still here.”

Her cold, gloveless hands grasped his and squeezed it. “I see that,” she said, a smile in her voice. There was a short shuffle, and then the angle of her hands on his changed as she sat down. “He has made his decision. You’ll be able to stay here, but you won’t walk into the Knights’ wing on your own anymore. You’ll only be allowed there in my company.”

It was so ridiculously small a price to pay for his life that Techie nearly laughed out loud. Instead he nodded. „I will do that.“ Krel squeezed his hand again, and his smile grew wider. He was alive. And he was so happy about it that the touch of Krel‘s hands, a touch he had tolerated before, now seemed like the most wonderful caress he could imagine.

„I‘m going to ask the medic about your eyes now. Do you need anything?“

He swallowed around the dry heaviness of his tongue again. „Something to drink, maybe?“

„I‘ll ask,“ she said, then she ruffled his hair again and walked away, her characteristic, light steps retreating.

A door closed somewhere; not the entrance door, but a smaller one. It opened again a few moments later, and now two sets of steps were coming towards him.

Krel sat down next to him again. The medic seemed to remain standing.

„Your new eyes are going to be ready for you very soon,“ said the medic. „I‘ll have to do a last examination of the sockets, and then I should be able to put them in tomorrow or the day after.“

The warm feeling in Techie‘s chest intensified. He was going to see again. He was going to see, and to live, and to stay here where he had people to protect him.

„The only thing that still needs to be clarified is, what color do you want your new irisses to be?“

At that, the warmth in his chest suddenly hitched. He hadn‘t expected them to actually ask him about this; he definitely hadn‘t been asked what color he wanted for his eyes the last time he had gotten a new pair.

„Uhm,“ he said, „what colors… are there?“

„You can basically choose whatever color you want. I only need to change a bit of coding, so it really doesn‘t matter a lot.“

Whatever color he wanted. He thought back to the few times before MaMa when he had looked in a mirror; when he had looked at his water green eyes, at the specks around his pupils. He had always thought his original eyes had been beautiful, unusual, maybe even unique.

But then the General‘s face came into his mind. Those same eyes, the exactly same eyes, watery green and speckled, looking at him with hatred, with disgust. The only difference was that his own eyes had never looked that cold.

He thought about the way that technician on the Finalizer had looked at him, that disgust when he had noticed his flaw. Had that really been only days ago? He thought about the horror when he had first seen his reflection in a dark screen, after what MaMa had done to him. The noise his eyes had made whenever he focused in or out.

He thought about the yellow eyes all around him; Krel, Lord Kanar, Lady Kashti.

He thought about Kylo‘s brown eyes with their slight greyish discoloration.

He thought of Krel‘s skin, of the warm ponds in her chambers.

„Blue,“ he said, lowly. „Light blue. Not like… Not glowing, like the ones I had before, but also still… still vibrantly light blue. Would that… Would that be possible?“

„Like I said, you can have whatever color you want.“

The medic made him sit up and pushed a glass of liquid into his hand. Then she left, and only he and Krel remained.

„I‘m really looking forward to seeing all of that pretty face again,“ Krel said, one of her hands idly stroking over Techie‘s leg. He felt himself blush slightly.

„I‘ll be happy to see you again too, my lady,“ he answered, and Krel chuckled. He drank his water and gave it back to Krel, who put it on some kind of surface with a low clunk.

„Thank you,“ he said suddenly. „Thank you, my lady.“

„What for?“ asked Krel, a surprised note in her voice, as she turned his hand around in hers and rubbed her thumb over his palm.

„Thank you that you‘ve taken me here,“ he said, as earnest as he had never been before, real gratefulness filling his entire being. „Thank you that you‘ve given me this chance. To live, I mean. I am going to be in your debt always.“

The cool thumb rubbed patterns into his palm, and then one of the hands let go and he felt it run over his head, ruffle his hair.

„I would say it was a really good investment,“ she said. „I‘m glad I‘ve brought you here.“

He felt a wonderful warmth in his chest, and before he could even think about it, he lifted the hand that was still in his to his lips and kissed it gently in reverence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Thank you for reading this story to the end! It was a lot of fun to write it, and I loved reading every single one of your comments!
> 
> As some of you might have noticed, I have put this story into a series. There will be some new installments, though mainly short, smutty things featuring Techie and various other characters (not Kylo though, that ship has sailed), because I am a pretty terrible person. If you are interested in smutty things happening to our sweet little Techie, then you should definitely subscribe to that series.
> 
> I have also posted all of this story on my [fanfiction blog](http://frillyfacefics.tumblr.com/post/174032454351/the-knights-pet-chapter-1), so if you liked this fic, it‘d be great if you could share it over there as well, or just tell your friends about it. And if you just want to say hi, or have a prompt you‘d like me to write, or want to tell me something else, just head over to my [main blog](http://frillyfacefics.tumblr.com). I‘m also on [twitter](Http://twitter.com/TheLadyLudovica) :)
> 
> Again, thank all of you for reading this fic! I had a lot of fun, and I hope you had a lot of fun as well!


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